| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri May 30, 2008 8:25 pm Post subject: Arnaud de Borchgrave on McClellan, Neocons & Clean Break |
| The Right--This Time the 'Washington Times'--Identifies Pro-Israel Agenda for Iraq War :
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/06/arnaud-de-borchgrave-has-a-fabulous-piece-in-washington-times-on-the-neocon-planning-for-the-iraq-war.html
Arnaud de Borchgrave on McClellan, Neocons & Clean Break
http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/jun/02/commentary-babble-rabble/
COMMENTARY: Babble rabble
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Monday, June 2, 2008
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan is excoriated for stating the obvious. The Iraq war, he writes in his memoirs titled "What Happened in the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," was sold to the American people with a sophisticated "political propaganda campaign."
This, in turn, was designed to "manipulate public opinion" in such a way as to downplay "the major reason for going to war." Disinformation was an integral pat of the process.
How else does one explain that at one point 60 percent of Americans believed the palpably fraudulent nonsense that the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11, 2001? A gullible, manipulated public also became convinced Iraq was a mortal danger to the United States at a time when two no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq , at a cost of $11 billion a year, kept Saddam confined to his dirty little sandbox.
None of his neighbors were afraid of him. Nor were our European allies. But the neocons kept beating the drums of war on U.S. television networks with the fiction we were locked in an existential struggle with Iraq .
As for the invasion of Iraq being the biggest strategic blunder in U.S. history, as Mr. McClellan belatedly states, the same judgment was rendered years ago by many prominent foreign policy experts, both Republican and Democrat, namely John Whitehead, a Republican and former deputy secretary of state; Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter; Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to both Presidents Ford and George Bush the elder; and even former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had been hoodwinked by fatally flawed intelligence provided by a pseudo Iraqi intelligence operative who would only talk to Germans.
The operative was codenamed "Curveball." German interrogators distrusted what he told them about Saddam's capabilities for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It was passed on to U.S. counterparts. They shared German skepticism. But it was handed to Mr. Powell by the CIA director who had not read the addendum on Curveball's dubious credentials. Thus, what was called "incontrovertible evidence" became the piece de resistance in Mr. Powell's infamous U.N. speech of Feb. 5, 2003, six weeks before the invasion.
This reporter first heard about the inevitability of war a year before the invasion at a party given by Dick Cheney - "the magic man," writes Mr. McClellan - and his wife Lynne to celebrate the paperback edition of chief of staff Scooter Libby's book "The Apprentice."
The capital's top neocons were on hand and convinced dubious listeners that war with Iraq was now inevitable. They were persuasive when they corrected me for saying, "If there is a war."
The decision had been taken for a shock-and-awe blitz against Saddam's Republican Guard divisions, they said. What about the United Nations? I asked. That, I was told, was the obligatory charade we had to go through for world public opinion.
So Mr. McClellan is correct when he writes senior administration officials began a campaign in 2002 to "aggressively sell the war," even as he and other officials insisted all options were on the table. Of course it was a war of choice, not of necessity, as he writes. The Bush administration's main motive for invading Iraq was to introduce "coercive democracy."
This, in turn, originated in a controversial 1996 White Paper titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," which referred to Israel . It advised then incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to repeal the Oslo agreements for a Palestinian solution, keep Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli control, and establish democracy in Iraq by overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Democracy in Iraq , said "Clean Break," would then be followed by similar regime changes in Syria and Iran . Thus, Israel could begin to relax and look forward to real security for the indefinite future.
Among its principal authors were neocon theoreticians Richard Perle, soon to be chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Douglas Feith, who became undersecretary of defense for policy and who was also in charge of post-Iraq invasion planning; David Wurmser, who later joined Mr. Feith's Pentagon team, before his elevation to deputy assistant to Dick Cheney for national security - all superhawks on Iran as well.
Mr. Feith also had a big bone to pick with Mr. Bush. In his recently published memoir - "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism" - Mr. Feith charges President Bush with sending confusing and conflicting signals following the embarrassment of not finding any WMD in Iraq. Mr. Bush then focused "almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy." This new pitch, says Mr. Feith in a Wall Street Journal op-ed adaptation of his book, "compounded the damage to the president's credibility [as he was seen] distancing himself from the case he had made for removing [Saddam] from power."
Mr. Feith points out beginning with his first major Iraq speech before the U.N. Sept 12, 2002, Mr. Bush delivered nine major Iraq talks with 14 paragraphs per speech on Saddam's record as an enemy, aggressor, tyrant and imminent danger, and only three paragraphs on promoting Iraqi democracy. But from September 2003 through September 2004, Mr. Feith says Mr. Bush gave 15 major speeches with an average of 11 paragraphs per talk on democracy.
"The stunning change," Mr. Feith added, "appeared to confirm his critics' argument that the security rationale for the war was at best an error, and at worst a lie."
Scott McClellan's former White House colleagues feigned sadness rather than anger on the tube and asked why he didn't speak up when he was still on the government payroll. This lament studiously ignored the fact Mr. McClellan was not a policymaker and was in no position to question what he was told to say at the daily White House media briefing. His job was to take orders, not question them.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International
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http://www.upi.com/International_Security/Emerging_Threats/Analysis/2008/05/30/commentary_tower_of_babble_rabble/7705/
Subject: Commentary: Tower of Babble Rabble
Date: Friday, May 30, 2008
Commentary: Tower of Babble Rabble
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON , May 30 (UPI) -- Former White House Press secretary Scott McClellan is excoriated for stating the obvious. The Iraq War, he writes in his memoirs titled "What Happened in the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," was sold to the American people with a sophisticated "political propaganda campaign." This, in turn, was designed to "manipulate public opinion" in such a way as to downplay "the major reason for going to war." Disinformation was an integral part of the process.
How else does one explain that at one point 60 percent of Americans believed the palpably fraudulent nonsense that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11? A gullible, manipulated public also became convinced that Iraq was a mortal danger to the United States at a time when two no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq , at a cost of $11 billion a year, kept Saddam confined to his dirty little sandbox. None of his neighbors was afraid of him. Nor were our European allies. But the neocons kept beating the drums of war on U.S. television networks with the fiction we were locked in an existential struggle with Iraq .
As for the invasion of Iraq being the biggest strategic blunder in U.S. history, as McClellan belatedly states, the same judgment was rendered years ago by many prominent foreign policy experts, both Republican and Democrat, namely John Whitehead, a Republican and former deputy secretary of state; Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter; Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Presidents Ford and Bush 41; and even former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had been hoodwinked by fatally flawed intelligence provided by a pseudo Iraqi intelligence operative who would only talk to Germans.
Codenamed "Curveball," he was distrusted by German interrogators when he told them about Saddam's WMD capabilities. When the intelligence was passed on to U.S. counterparts, they shared German skepticism. But it was handed to Powell by the CIA director, who had not read the addendum on Curveball's dubious credentials. Thus, what was described as "incontrovertible evidence" became the piece de resistance in Powell's infamous U.N. speech of Feb. 5, 2003, six weeks before the invasion.
This reporter first heard about the inevitability of war a year before the invasion at a party given by Dick Cheney -- "the magic man," writes McClellan -- and his wife, Lynne, to celebrate the publication of Chief of Staff Scooter Libby's paperback edition of his book "The Apprentice."
The capital's top neocons were on hand and convinced dubious listeners war with Iraq was now inevitable. They were persuasive when they corrected me for saying, "If there is a war
" The decision had been made for a shock-and-awe blitz against Saddam's Republican Guard divisions, they said. "What about the U.N.?" I asked. That, I was told, was the obligatory charade we had to go through for world public opinion.
So McClellan is correct when he writes senior administration officials began a campaign in 2002 to "aggressively sell the war," even as he and other officials insisted all options were on the table. Of course, it was a war of choice, not of necessity, as he writes. The Bush administration's main motive for invading Iraq was to introduce "coercive democracy."
This motive originated in a controversial 1996 White Paper titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," which referred to Israel . It advised incoming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to repeal the Oslo agreements for a Palestinian solution, keep Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli control, and establish democracy in Iraq by overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Democracy in Iraq , said "Clean Break," would be followed by similar regime changes in Syria and Iran . Thus, Israel could begin to relax and look forward to real security for the indefinite future.
Among its principal authors were neocon theoreticians Richard Perle, soon to be chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Douglas Feith, who became undersecretary of defense for policy and was also in charge of post-Iraq invasion planning; ad David Wurmser, who later joined Feith's Pentagon team before his elevation to deputy assistant to Dick Cheney for national security -- all superhawks on Iran as well.
Feith also had a big bone to pick with President Bush. His recently published memoir -- "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism" -- charges Bush with confusing and conflicting signals following the embarrassment of not finding any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush then focused "almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy." This new pitch, says Feith in a Wall Street Journal op-ed adaptation of his book, "compounded the damage to the president's credibility, (as he was seen) distancing himself from the case he had made for removing (Saddam) from power."
Feith points out that, beginning with his first major Iraq speech before the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, Bush delivered nine major Iraq talks with 14 paragraphs per speech on Saddam's record as an enemy, aggressor, tyrant and imminent danger, and only three paragraphs on promoting Iraqi democracy. But from September 2003 to September 2004, Feith says Bush gave 15 major speeches with an average of 11 paragraphs per talk on democracy.
"The stunning change," Feith added, "appeared to confirm his critics' argument that the security rationale for the war was at best an error, and at worst a lie."
Scott McClellan's former White House colleagues feigned sadness rather than anger on the tube and asked why he didn't speak up when he was still on the government payroll. This lament studiously ignored the fact that McClellan was not a policymaker and was in no position to question what he was told to say at the daily White House press briefing. His job was to take orders, not question them.
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It's Insane to Attack Iran, Devastating Consequences:
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2008/05/hedges-its-insane-to-attack-iran.html
http://NEOCONZIONISTTHREAT.BLOGSPOT.COM
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http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/may/30/a-move-to-curb-capitalism/
COMMENTARY: A move to curb capitalism?
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Friday, May 30, 2008
Predatory lending in the housing market with two sets of books coupled with oil speculators who buy black gold by the hundreds of thousands of barrels a day (minimum buy on the Rotterdam spot market is 1,000 barrels) and sit on it until they've made a pile, and many other sleights of hand, are forcing America's airlines, once the envy of the world, to look at Chapters 7, 11 or 12 of bankruptcy laws.
Casualties are mounting as airlines face fuel bills $89 billion larger than last year. Airlines reckon they may lose $40 billion this year, thrice the deficit recorded in 2001 after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In less than a month, Australia 's Qantas twice announced across-the-board fare increases, each time plus 4 percent, to pay for fuel. American Airlines plans to reduce its U.S. flight capacity more than 10 percent in the fourth quarter. Passengers are already being charged from $15 to $25 per bag and thousands of airline personnel are already laid off.
Republican oil billionaire Boone Pickens sees oil continuing its upward climb to $150. Other handicappers put the ceiling at $200, and double that again if hostilities break out between the U.S. and Iran .
Outlandish executive compensation packages, a housing bubble with some 57 varieties of spellbinding mortgages, ethanol and the global food crisis, the erosion of the middle classes into the ranks of the poor, all are driving mammon capitalism into bankruptcy. A paradigm shift from bandit capitalism to democratic capitalism is in the making with the objective of getting naked greed under control. Cassandras and Pollyannas are battling it out with wet fingers to the wind over a full-blown or mild recession.
A few years ago, liberal philanthropist George Soros dropped a bomb at the annual shindig of movers and shakers in Davos when he said unfettered capitalism is the greatest danger to democracy. He should know. On Black Wednesday, Sept. 16, 1992, Mr. Soros broke the Bank of England by shorting more than $10 billion worth of pounds, cashing in on the Bank of England's reluctance to either raise its interest rates or to float sterling, and netted for himself $1.1 billion.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's bogeyman was Big Business. Ronald Reagan had Big Labor. And the 44th president is almost bound to have Big Finance. A paradigm shift from unfettered to fettered appears to be in the making. Democratic control of the White House and both houses of Congress would quickly translate into more regulation.
In Kevin Phillips' new book, "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis in American Capitalism," the former Republican Party strategist deals with the reckless expansion of private debt as well as the federal budget deficit.
Mr. Phillips is not alone these days when he sees U.S. financial capitalism "at a pivotal period in the nation's history, cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling U.S. credit market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of dishonesty, incompetence and quantitative negligence."
This upheaval is probably the greatest story never told and covers two decades from 1986 to 2006. The number of billionaires in the world jumped from 350 before Sept. 11 to more than 1,000 today.
The Republican renegade describes today's financial services sector as "a grasping, gargantuan combination of banks, stockbrokers, insurancemen, loan sharks, credit card issuers, hedge fund speculators, securitization mavens and mortgage operators."
Over the last five years, financial services have reached a swollen 21 percent of U.S. GDP - the largest sector of the private economy. With twin-war costs now well more than half a trillion dollars, and "Happy Motoring" utopia running on empty, no one seemed to notice.
Science may yet come to the rescue of democratic capitalism - or make things worse. In South Korea , the RNL Bio company received the first-ever commercial order for cloning. An American woman paid the company $50,000 to clone her dead pit-bull terrier, Booger.
In the United States, the world's most prominent scientists and futurists met to assess how science could improve the human race over the next two decades.
Ray Kurzweil, America 's leading scientist-futurist ("The Singularity is Near"), sees nanotechnology over the next 20 years transmogrifying Homo sapiens with an upgrade. Mr. Kurzweil told the BBC, "We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons." The next level up for Homo connect-us is known as transhumanism, first coined by Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous who wrote "Brave New World"), who described it as "man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for human nature."
Nanotech scientist Eric Drexler agrees with Mr. Kurzweil that we are on the brink of a new technological breakthrough, similar in scope and significance to man's breakthrough to the industrial age.
Soon, they say, nanotech will enable humankind to get all the energy we need from solar power, and make 99 percent of illnesses easily curable by specially designed nanobot antibodies that will hunt down specific viruses in our blood and kill them, also to augment our reflexes, our concentration, even our intelligence, with nano-implants in our bodies and brains.
The blog Global Dashboard, which is often ahead of the scientific news curve, reports Francis Fukuyama is not writing about the Future of History because he believes transhumanism "is the most dangerous idea facing humanity." The new technology, he believes, would be more available to rich individuals or rich societies, and thus might create a "genetic overclass." And greed galore.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.
Last edited by Alpha on Mon Jun 09, 2008 11:59 am; edited 3 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jun 02, 2008 11:58 pm Post subject: McClellan's Warning on Iran |
| June 2, 2008
McClellan's Warning on Iran
by Ray McGovern
Stop! Please. Get beneath the hype over former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. Don't miss the forest for the trees.
Not since John Dean told the truth about President Richard Nixon's crimes have we had an account by a very close aide to a sitting president charging him with crimes of the most serious kind.
McClellan writes that George W. Bush abandoned "candor and honesty" to wage a "political campaign" that led the nation into an "unnecessary war."
The chief U.S. prosecutor of senior Nazi officials at the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, labeled such action more correctly termed a war of aggression the "supreme international crime."
In other words, President Bush used propaganda and deception to lead the United States into what an earlier generation of American leaders judged not just a war crime, but the "supreme" war crime.
And, in all this, Bush had an eager cast aiding and abetting from careerists in the U.S. intelligence community to the fawning corporate media (FCM) whom McClellan referred to as "deferential, complicit enablers."
As for the role of intelligence, McClellan tells of "shading the truth." In the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, the president used "innuendo and implication" and intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary.
Water over the dam, you say? No way.
White House spinners are at it again "fixing" the intelligence around the policy, this time on Iran. The fixing is obvious, but don't expect to hear about it from the FCM.
An exception is MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. His antiquated approach is to ask relevant questions like, for example, will the White House do an encore in preparing us for an attack on Iran?
Interviewing McClellan Thursday evening, Olbermann earmarked time to discuss Iran and asked, "So knowing what you know, if [White House spokeswoman] Dana Perino starts making noises similar to what you heard from Ari Fleischer in 2002
would you be suspicious?"
"I would be," McClellan said.
Wait. Before taking this with a blasι shrug, consider the source.
Fixing In Fits and Starts
The worst-kept secret in Washington is that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are looking for a pretext to order air and missile attacks on Iran. But when and how will Dana Perino and the rest of the propaganda machine market this one?
When to sell? If former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card's dictum regarding "marketing" the war on Iraq holds sway i.e., "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August" the administration has only two months, unless it opts for an "October Surprise" as a more effective way to help achieve a Republican victory in November.
But a smooth rolling out of war on Iran has proven more troublesome no thanks, by the way, to the FCM, most of them still claiming they did just fine before the war on Iraq.
Part of the problem has been the new marketers. With Andy Card, Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett, and Tony Snow gone, it is amateur hour for White House spinners as they start-stop and rotate rationales for striking Iran.
And how to sell? Less than a year ago the focus was twofold:
(1) What President Bush on Aug. 28 called "Tehran's murderous activities" against our troops, including "240-millimeter rockets that have been manufactured in Iran and that had been provided to Iraqi extremist groups by Iranian agents;" and
(2) His ad-lib on Oct. 17: "We've got a leader in Iran who has announced he wants to destroy Israel.
I take the threat of a nuclear Iran very seriously."
Oops
But where are those 240-millimeter rocket shells? For some reason, Gen. David Petraeus cannot deliver the goods.
As recently as April 25, his nominal boss, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen, invited the press to what was supposed to be a well-oiled show-and-tell exercise "in a couple of weeks," to display a multitude of captured weapons from Iran.
But the show did not go on; it had to be canceled when the weapons that had been found proved not to be of Iranian origin.
Ironically, one major hurdle would be getting senior Iraqi officials to go along with a hyped-up demonstration of weaponry from Iran.
Shortly after Mullen offered his invitation, the Iraqis announced that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had formed his own Cabinet committee to investigate U.S. claims about Iranian weapons, and to attempt to "find tangible information and not information based on speculation."
The other pretext is the hyped-up danger from Iran's nuclear program.
Here, the administration suffered acute embarrassment when a vestigial group of honest intelligence analysts and supervisors had the temerity to serve up an un-fixed intelligence National Intelligence Estimate last fall that showed that Bush had been knowingly exaggerating the nuclear threat from Iran.
The declassified key findings of the NIE were released on Dec. 3. They included:
"We judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate to high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."
"We assess with moderate confidence Tehran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons."
"Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously."
To Bush and Cheney's dismay, the findings had been shared with Congress and could not be suppressed.
What followed was the ineffably inept performance one has come to expect from National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, who claimed the Estimate "confirms we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons [which] remains a very serious problem."
And before leaving for his early January 2008 trip to the Middle East, the president said part of his purpose was to make it "abundantly clear
that we view Iran as a threat, and that the NIE in no way lessens that threat, but in fact clarifies the threat."
Got that? Threat.
According to Newsweek's well-connected reporter Michael Hirsh, Bush all but disowned the NIE in conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
According to a senior U.S. official accompanying the president, Bush told the Israelis that he couldn't control what the intelligence community says, but that the Estimate's key judgments do not reflect his own views.
Bush reportedly had briefed Olmert in November on the Estimate's findings, and he seemed almost apologetic about the findings.
After Bush departed Israel in January, a Newsweek reporter asked Olmert if he felt reassured, to which Olmert replied, "I am very happy."
A Flexible Director of National Intelligence
Malleable Mike McConnell showed his true colors shortly after the president got back from Israel.
Unable to withstand withering criticism from the likes of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, and the irrepressible former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, McConnell backpedaled.
In testimony to the Senate on Feb. 5 he confessed to careless wording in the NIE due to time constraints, and even indicated he "probably would have changed a thing or two."
He would now say, for example, that "maybe even the least significant portion [of the Iranian nuclear program] was halted and there are other parts that continue."
Next at bat was the president himself in an interview on March 19 with the U.S.-government-run Radio Farda broadcasting to Iran in Farsi.
Bush asserted that Iran has "declared it wants a nuclear weapon to destroy people" and that it could be hiding a secret program. A White House cleanup team conceded that Bush's statement about what Iran has "declared" was inaccurate.
It was Defense Secretary Robert Gates' turn in April. Speaking at West Point, Gates said he believes Iran is "hell bent" on acquiring nuclear weapons. (Does it strike anyone that abandoning their weapons program in 2003 seems a strange way of going about it?)
Gates added that he favored keeping the military option against Iran on the table.
The NY Times Jumps In
And on May 27, the New York Times misquoted one of the key judgments of the NIE. More than a subtle distinction, the Times indicated that the Estimate stated, "It was uncertain whether the weapons work had resumed."
Speaking to the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) two days later, McConnell's deputy, Donald Kerr, took the same line, emphasizing that "since the halted activities were part of an unannounced secret program Iran attempted to hide, we do not know if it has been restarted." (Emphasis in original)
This is the spin that the president, senior officials and the New York Times have been putting on the NIE.
As noted above, the relevant NIE key judgment reads: "We assess with moderate confidence Tehran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007
"
(Incidentally, that Kerr, as deputy to McConnell, would give a major address to WINEP moves the intelligence community much too close to a partisanship with this group, at least for this veteran intelligence officer's taste. Martin Indyk, erstwhile research director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, America's self-described "pro-Israel lobby," founded the institute. AIPAC is listed as its parent organization.)
Rather than shadowboxing, making confessions when it seems opportune, and introducing subtle changes of emphasis aimed at making the Estimate's judgments more politically palatable, McConnell and Kerr should do their duty.
And that is to follow the long established intelligence community procedure for updating an important NIE by ordering preparation of what is called a "Memorandum to Holders" in this case, holders of last fall's NIE on Iran.
This is an orderly, time-tested way to get the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that prepared the NIE on Iran to revisit it in a deliberate and rigorous way and to indicate what, if anything, they believe needs to be changed.
At the release of the unclassified version of the NIE on Iran on Dec. 3, 2007, Kerr issued a written statement explaining why the key judgments were being made public.
"Since our understanding of Iran's capabilities has changed, we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available," he said.
Exactly right. So if the NIE's judgments are being challenged and/or are in need of update, let Kerr or McConnell give the task to the dedicated professionals responsible for drafting the NIE late last year.
And if McConnell should decide or be told by the White House not to, the congressional oversight committees should awake from their stupor and require a Memorandum for Holders.
It is certainly their prerogative, their duty, to do so.
Someone apparently needs to tell Director McConnell that it is not required that the Israelis or Kissinger, or Schlesinger, or Bolton agree with the Estimate's conclusions, however much the president would like all to be in sync with the preferred line.
And, given the stakes, the new findings should not be rushed or done on the cheap.
Learning Curve Still Steep
McConnell (and Kerr, for that matter) are still new to substantive intelligence analysis, and McConnell has admitted having difficulty with the rigorous demands of the job. Frankly, I find it unsettling that one of them briefs the president six mornings a week.
McConnell's lack of experience on issues other than technical intelligence collection showed through in an especially troubling way on Feb. 27, 2007, as he briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked McConnell why the Israelis sometimes have a different view on Iran's nuclear program.
McConnell appeared quite puzzled, noting the closeness of the U.S.-Israeli intelligence relationship and how U.S. intelligence officers discussed these things with the Israelis. As I watched, I could not help feeling sorry for the director of national intelligence and for the rest of us, as well.
A pity that his predecessor, the more seasoned John Negroponte, did not take time to tell McConnell what he told NPR's Robert Siegel before Negroponte quit to go back to the State Department.
Asked by Siegel to explain why the Israelis have suggested a much shorter timeline for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, Negroponte stated the obvious with bluntness uncommon for a diplomat: "I think that sometimes what the Israelis will do [is] give you the worst-case assessment."
Really!
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