Pat Allen: The View from Right Field

The UN Says Iran Is Probably Trying to Build Nuclear Weapons and the CIA Is Wrong – Again

The most amazing report was issued on Thursday. According to The Wall Street Journal:

"The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said it has information suggesting Iran may be working to build a nuclear warhead ….

The International Atomic Energy Agency, a Vienna-based U.N. body, said in a confidential report Thursday that Iran has impeded Agency efforts to establish the true purpose of Tehran’s nuclear program.

‘The information available to the agency … raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile,’ IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano wrote in the report.

The expression of concern over the ‘weaponization’ of enriched uranium is a first for the agency. …

In the report Mr. Amano cites open questions about ‘possible military dimensions’ of Iran’s nuclear program, adding that Iran has failed to explain the ‘procurement and R&D activities of military related institutes and companies.’"

The Washington Post reported:

"The IAEA report is unusually frank in scolding Iran for failing to explain purchases of sensitive technology as well as secret tests of high-precision detonators and modified designs of missile cones to accommodate larger payloads – experiments closely associated with atomic warheads. Although most of the research took place nearly a decade ago, the report said that some tests ‘seem to have continued beyond 2004.’"

Such a report would be troubling no matter who put it out, but the fact it came from the United Nations makes it all the more significant.

For all the talk in Washington about health care and deficits and Tea Parties (the last of which seems appropriate since Washington has always had a bit of an "Alice in Wonderland"-feel to it), this is probably the most important, and scariest, development in the world today.

After all, if Iran has a bomb, won’t Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Egypt want bombs, too? (Israel, obviously, already has them.) And if Israel has a bomb (publicly), isn’t Hezbollah, next? The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has given Hezbollah every weapon it has; why not the bomb? (Are you getting scared yet?)

Some say that the situation can be managed. The United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, and they didn’t start a war. But compare the leaders of Iran, or the leaders of most of the other countries in the Middle East, with the leaders of the USSR or the US. Whose finger would you want on the button? When President Ahmadinejad says he will wipe the state of Israel off the map, which US leader or USSR leader does he sound like? (Actually, we know who he sounds like, and people didn’t believe him either.) (If not before, you should be scared by now.)

And what has the CIA been doing while the UN says that "[i]nformation suggests Tehran is working to build a warhead"? Getting it wrong.

In December of 2007, the Central Intelligence Agency issued a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that concluded, "with high confidence," that Iran had stopped its work on nuclear weapons in 2003.* This report contradicted an earlier report from November of 2004, which said that the United States had information suggesting that Iran was working on a nuclear warhead for a missile. When the 2007 report was issued, it directly undercut efforts by the Bush administration to stop the Iranian nuclear program. And coming after the alleged weapons of mass destruction that the CIA said were in Iraq but which were never found, it damaged the credibility of the Bush administration.

And now, it appears the CIA has gotten it wrong – again. This is amazing. What do these people do? The CIA is supposed to be giving our leaders the information that they need so they can make the decisions necessary to defend us – and the CIA keeps getting it wrong. And we are not talking about little things. We are talking about the most important issues of the day, and the CIA is getting them wrong. (Actually, they may be getting the little stuff wrong, too; we just never hear about it.)

Clearly, these questions are not easy to answer correctly, but the CIA is getting them wrong too often. Are they incompetent? Or do some of them have their own ax to grind, and does that affect the work they do and the conclusions they reach?** Or is it about bureaucrats protecting their turf? I don’t know, but it is becoming clear that we cannot rely on the CIA.

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* As noted here in much more detail, part of the problem with the CIA’s conclusion in 2007 may have been with how they framed the question. At that time, the concern was that, by focusing on the wrong question, the CIA may have been giving an inaccurate impression as to what Iran was doing. Now it appears that the CIA was even wrong on the question it framed.

** See here.

Investigating the CIA

I have not read many of the editorials, op-ed articles, blogs, etc., on the appointment, by Attorney General Eric Holder, of a special prosecutor to investigate possible mistreatment of detainees by CIA interrogators during the George W. Bush administration. I haven’t read them because they are all so predictable that there is little to be learned from them. You know what they say; I don’t need to summarize them or link to them.

What I wanted to say is how I look at this. I don’t know if anybody will agree, but here is how I feel.

First, there were rules set by the Bush administration as to what could be done and what could not be done in questioning detainees. Obviously, there are those on the left who think those rules themselves were illegal and that everybody involved needs to be prosecuted, up to and including Vice President Cheney and even President Bush himself. If that is what you believe, you can stop reading. You won’t come close to agreeing with what I think.

I start from the fact that there were rules. There were things that could be done, and there were also limits as to what could be done. If Attorney General Holder has credible evidence that certain investigators clearly went beyond a reasonable understanding of those rules, then it is proper that there should be an investigation and, depending on what happened, prosecutions.

Please note that I am not talking about violations of some international law that allegedly overrides the rules our government established and that would allow prosecutions of people who did things that were within our rules but were allegedly improper under those other standards. I am talking about people who clearly violated our own rules. If that was done, then we should act. But if what these people did was within a reasonable understanding of the rules in effect at the time of their actions, then they should not be prosecuted now.

But "following rules" isn’t a defense, the left tells us. That is what Nuremberg was all about. You can’t just say "you were following orders". No, I’m sorry. This is not Nuremberg. We are not talking about killing six million Jews. We are not talking about trying to exterminate an entire race of people. We are talking about interrogation techniques, admittedly harsh, used on a limited number of detainees, maybe a couple of hundred, at most, right after the biggest terrorist attack ever on the United States. This is not Nuremberg, and making the comparison is not helpful.

The fact that this comparison is made by some of those who favor an investigation explains some of the concern of those who oppose an investigation. The problem that many of those who are opposed to an investigation have with this whole idea is not that they defend every action taken by every investigator with respect to every detainee. The problem is that they are not sure they can trust the people who have ordered the investigation to actually conduct a fair investigation based a real understanding of not just what we think now, but what we understood then.

They see those on the left who were always opposed to almost any kind of interrogation of detainees, who wanted to give detainees Miranda warnings and lawyers from the very beginning.

But the people who are perhaps even more worrisome are those who have switched sides. Back then they wanted to do whatever was necessary to prevent another attack. They couldn’t understand why we couldn’t "get" Osama Bin Laden, and they criticized President Bush constantly because Osama had not been captured. But as time passed and there was no attacks (on the United States), as memories faded, and, maybe, as the politics shifted, some on the left have forgotten how our nation, how they, felt back then.

The fear of those who oppose Attorney General Holder’s investigation is that men and women who tried to follow the rules six and seven years ago will be prosecuted for doing things that they reasonably believed were allowed under the rules, but that are now deemed unacceptable by people looking at things from eight years of safety, as opposed to the recent memory of 3000 deaths and the very real fear of thousands more.

Unfortunately, the President’s own statements during the campaign last year, and some of the apologies he has felt it was necessary to give about the United States during his overseas trips this year, have fed those fears. Even some of us who accept that there may be a need for an investigation have a very real concern that honorable people, doing what they legitimately thought was allowed and permissible and necessary to defend their country from a very serious threat, will be unfairly judged by Monday morning quarterbacks and second-guessers applying the rules of today to actions of a different and more dangerous time.

If Democrats Attack the CIA, Should Republicans Automatically Defend It?

Last week the media reported that CIA Director Leon Panetta shut down an intelligence program that had been set up in 2001 and never disclosed to Congress and that he told Congress about it as soon as he found out about it himself.

Some Democrats in Congress immediately said this showed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was right when she claimed, back in May, that the CIA lied to Congress and to her. (As you may remember, Ms. Pelosi said that the CIA had intentionally misled her in September of 2002 when they briefed her, and other Congressional leaders, about the interrogation techniques being used on certain detainees. Ms. Pelosi claimed she was not told the CIA was actually using waterboarding. She said they just said they could legally use those techniques.)

In response Republicans jumped to the CIA’s defense.

Two comments: First, the question of whether CIA misled Nancy Pelosi in September 2002 isn’t really relevant to the question of why Nancy Pelosi remained silent about the interrogation methods being used, the ones she is so critical of today, for so long even after she really did find out about them, which was in February of 2003. She claims she didn’t complain in writing because she knew Representative Jane Harman was writing a letter about the methods and because Ms. Harman, as the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, was the appropriate person to do so. Once the Bush administration rejected Ms. Harman’s letter, Ms. Pelosi said there was nothing else she could do. Yeah, right. But I already covered that question here.

Second, while the Democrats’ attempt to use this situation to defend what Speaker Pelosi said about the CIA is somewhat silly, Republicans should not be coming to the CIA’s defense on an almost-knee jerk basis. Three years ago Representative Peter Hoekstra (R, Mich) raised some very serious questions about whether there was a group within the CIA that was intentionally trying to undermine President Bush’s policies in Iraq and elsewhere (see here).

Then there was the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that the CIA issued in December of 2007. By framing the questions in the NIE the way they did, the CIA effectively undercut President Bush’s policies on Iran’s nuclear program.  (See here.)

In December of 2007, I quoted Jim Hoagland as saying that "[t]he intelligence community — and particularly the CIA … — has today made itself a separate agency of government, answerable essentially to itself."

This, the control of the CIA by the President, is the real issue. If the Democrats could get past their election rhetoric of "all things Bush are bad", they could see this. On the other hand, Republicans should not automatically defend the CIA just because Democrats are attacking it or because it seems like a way to get at Nancy Pelosi.

The CIA is not a separate branch of government. It is not supposed to have its own foreign policy. The questions I raised in my post of December 17, 2007, are real concerns, but a Democratic Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid is not going investigate them. Therefore, it is up to Republicans in Congress to keep this issue alive until there is a chance to investigate it. In the meantime, Republicans need to not automatically defend the CIA just because Democrats are criticizing it.

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Update (7/15/09 12;23 a.m.): I changed the title of this post by adding "Automatically" after "Republicans".  I think that helps make my point better.

Who Is Making Our Foreign Policy?

The story of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran raises some interesting questions, like "If they got it wrong two years ago, why should we believe them now?", "Don’t they ever get anything right?" and "How could Bush be so stupid?".

Dennis Ross asks a better question in The New Republic. (See here.) He wonders why the NIE makes the Iranian suspension of their covert nuclear program in 2003 its main point (assuming the intelligence community is right, this time), as opposed to the fact that the Iranians are continuing their efforts to either enrich uranium or separate out plutonium. According to Ross, making weapons out of fissionable material is easy; producing fissionable material is not. What the Iranians have done, then, is merely to stop working on the easy thing while continuing to work on the hard one. And the effect? Stopping work on the easy thing while you continue working on the hard one is not going to slow down your timetable that much. But the NIE doesn’t mention that.

By emphasizing the wrong question, the NIE has undermined the United States’ policy toward Iran and made it more difficult, not only for the US but also Western Europe, to stop Iran from either getting nuclear weapons or at least being in a position where their regional neighbors will think, and react as if, the Iranians will shortly be getting nuclear weapons.

Ross says the intelligence community can be criticized for focusing the NIE on the wrong issue, but he saves most of his criticism for what he claims was the mismanagement of the disclosure of the NIE by the Bush administration.

Ross almost wonders why the Bush administration disclosed the NIE, noting that NIEs are usually not publicized, but he finally admits this one would have leaked if the Bush administration had not disclosed it. But he still complains that the Bush administration did not properly warn our allies of what was coming.

These are valid points, but other questions remain. Assuming that the NIE had to be disclosed because it would in any case have been leaked, who would have leaked it? Why did the NIE ask the question this way? Since the NIE was going to be leaked if it was not disclosed, doesn’t that mean that whoever got to decide what questions to emphasize and how to phrase them was able to, in effect, decide US policy on Iran? And finally, perhaps the most important question (a question that I touched on almost a year and a half ago {see here}): Who is running our intelligence agencies, and why?

On the first question, Ross says the NIE would have been leaked once the Congressional oversight committees were briefed on its contents, implying the leaks would have come from Congress. But is that true? Would the leaks have waited that long? Might they have come even earlier, from somebody else?

With respect to the second and third questions, is it really likely the Bush administration wanted the questions in the NIE presented this way? Or is it more likely that people at the CIA and the other intelligence agencies provided not only the answers but also the questions?

In thinking about these questions, consider the following:

During the 2004 election, the CIA allowed one of its then-current employees to write a book highly critical of the Bush’s Iraq policy and to go on a publicity tour to talk about the book. (Books by CIA employees have to be reviewed before they can be published.) I would understand somebody from the Department of Agriculture or Health and Human Services, but the CIA, our intelligence agency? Aren’t they are supposed to keep secrets? Why was this approved?

Similarly, how much of the whole Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame brouhaha was really aimed at trying to divert attention from all of the mistakes the CIA made in its intelligence reports about Iraq during the last years of Saddam Hussein’s rule? Was Wilson trying to get Bush or was he just trying to protect his wife and her friends at work?

Wasn’t Representative Peter Hoekstra concerned about who was really running the CIA in the letter he sent to President Bush back in May of 2006? (See here again.)

Many people, including some who are not generally supportive of President Bush on Iran (or other things, for that matter), agree the new NIE on Iran has harmed the cause of keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons. So why was it written this way? I do not know, but Jim Hoagland said this:

"The intelligence community — and particularly the CIA … — has today made itself a separate agency of government, answerable essentially to itself. This NIE makes clear that for better or worse, spy agencies today make the finished product of policy rather than providing the raw materials."

Hoagland does not object to this: 

"On balance, the consequences of disclosure are positive: As its authors clearly intended, the document removes any basis for the U.S. military strikes on Iran that many of us have argued would be unwise and unnecessary."

But clearly Hoagland’s view is based on his approval out of the policy outcome. One wonders if he would feel the same if there was a different President and a different CIA.

He certainly does not seem to consider whether one really wants the intelligence agencies to have a foreign policy that is different from that of the President and what it says about democratic government if unelected, and apparently uncontrolled, bureaucrats get to decide what our foreign policy is.

[12/29/2007 (further revised): I may have remembered incorrectly when I said that "the CIA allowed one of its then-current employees to write a book highly critical of the Bush’s Iraq policy and to go on a publicity tour to talk about the book". What I remembered was probably this (see Robert Novak here): "The CIA's contempt for the president was demonstrated during his 2004 re-election campaign when a senior intelligence officer, Paul R. Pillar, made off-the-record speeches around the country criticizing the invasion of Iraq." My point is valid, however, since it is hard to believe those speeches could have been made without at least agency acquiescence.]

CIA Versus Bush

While Tom McGuire at JustOneMinute has done a great job of covering the story, I want to make a comment on a most incredible letter that The New York Times published last Saturday. The letter was from Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. It was addressed to President Bush and dated May 18, 2006.

The article in the Times focused, of course, on that part of the letter in which Representative Hoekstra complained the Bush Administration had not kept the House and Senate Intelligence Committees briefed on certain activities. Obviously, this is what the Times would highlight: Even Republicans are claiming the Bush Administration is not informing Congress and may be violating the law.

However, that was not the most interesting part of the letter. The most interesting, and the scariest, part of the letter is this:

"First, I am concerned that the nominations for Director and Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency signal a retreat from needed reforms of the Agency. … [T]he choice for Deputy Director, Steve Kappes, is more troubling, both on a substantive and personal level. …

There has been much public and private speculation about the politicization of the Agency. … In fact, I have been long concerned that a strong and well-positioned group within the Agency intentionally undermined the Administration and its policies. This argument is supported by the Ambassador Wilson/Valerie Plane events, as well as by the string of unauthorized disclosures from an organization that prides itself with being able to keep secrets. I have come to the belief that, despite his service to the DO [Directorate of Operations], Mr. Kappes may have been part of this group."

Before continuing, please read those excerpts again. This is incredible. Rep. Hoekstra is saying that there is a sizeable group within the CIA that is working to intentionally undermine the President. A rogue group in the CIA is trying to make the President’s policies, trying to make our country’s policies, fail.

Also, note the reference to Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. It almost seems as if Rep. Hoekstra is saying the Wilson/Plame incident, if not a total set-up to get the President, was part of the effort to undermine the Bush Administration. In other words, Joe Wilson and his column in the Times was not a matter of an outraged citizen voicing his concerns. It was, instead, part of an organized effort within the CIA to undercut the President’s policies.

While not quite Seven Days in May, this is a very troubling situation. But the mainstream media has ignored it. The Times mentioned this part of the letter only in passing and did not elaborate on it. The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune did not even mention Rep. Hoekstra’s concerns, except to say he complained about the appointment of Steve Kappes. (I give credit to the Times for posting a copy of the letter on its website so people could read it themselves.)

Also, note what Rep. Hoekstra says about the choice of Mr. Kappes as new Deputy Director of the CIA. Rep. Hoekstra clearly fears that Mr. Kappes may have been part of the rogue group. If this is true, does Kappes’ appointment signal that President Bush is giving in and the rogue group has won? If this is so, it means an organized opposition in the CIA, with the help, whether witting or not, of the mainstream media and others, has been able to successfully undermine some of the most important policies of an elected President of the United States.

Obviously, we do not know what happened (and what still may be happening) here, but Rep. Hoekstra has raised some very important questions. Unfortunately, with the mainstream media seemingly only interested in things that can "get" President Bush, it is depressingly possible, in fact, probable, we may never really know whether an organized opposition within the CIA has been working against the President of the United States and his policies – and has won.