no doubt you already know of the release of the nic report on the iranian nuclear program yesterday. i find this article in the washington post (and others parallel to it, including the front page story in this morning's new york times) to be interesting.....
Quote:
Lessons of Iraq Aided Intelligence On Iran
Officials Cite New Caution And a Surge in Spying
By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 5, 2007; A01
The starkly different view of Iran's nuclear program that emerged from U.S. spy agencies this week was the product of a surge in clandestine intelligence-gathering in Iran as well as radical changes in the way the intelligence community analyzes information.
Drawing lessons from the intelligence debacle over supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell required agencies to consult more sources and to say to a larger intelligence community audience precisely what they know and how they know it -- and to acknowledge, to a degree previously unheard of, what they do not know.
" 'Do not know' is a new technical term for an NIE," said a senior official who was involved in preparation of the report, known as a National Intelligence Estimate.
While intelligence officials say the new conclusion about the Iranian program proved that the reforms were sound, the wide gap between Monday's report and previous assessments also left the agencies vulnerable to accusations that officials had failed for too long to grasp a fundamental change in course by Iran's leaders.
The new report upended years of previous assessments by asserting that the Islamic republic halted the weapons side of its nuclear program in 2003. The report, while expressing concern about Iran's rapidly growing civilian nuclear energy program, contradicted assertions by top Bush administration officials and previous intelligence assessments that Iran has been bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.
"The new report brings the U.S. intelligence community in line with what the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] and several European governments were saying years ago," said David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector and president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.
In 2005, a National Intelligence Estimate had said Iran was "determined" to acquire nuclear weapons, a view that meshed with the foreign policy of an administration that in 2002 declared Iran to be part of an "axis of evil." But former and current U.S. intelligence officials said the flaws in that report reflected only the extreme difficulty of penetrating Iran's nuclear program.
"It's the hardest damn target out there -- harder than North Korea," said an intelligence official who contributed to the report. "This is a program they tried very hard to hide from us, and it was hard even to fathom who was in charge."
The 2005 report's assertions that Iran was secretly working on nuclear weapons turned out to be accurate, but dated. Ellen Laipson, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said the earlier judgment was based on credible information that may have been the best available at the time.
"It's not getting it wrong, it's that [the intelligence] collection may have been insufficient," said Laipson, now president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a defense think tank. "It takes years to know the truth."
A pivotal moment occurred in early summer 2005, when President Bush discussed the new Iran NIE with advisers during a routine intelligence briefing. Why, he asked, was it so hard to get information about Iran's nuclear program?
The exchange, described by a senior U.S. official who witnessed it, helped instigate the intelligence community's most aggressive attempt to penetrate Iran's highly secretive nuclear program. Over the coming months, the CIA established a new Iran Operations Division that brought analysts and clandestine collectors together to search for hard evidence.
Communications intercepts of Iranian nuclear officials and a stolen Iranian laptop containing diagrams related to the development of a nuclear warhead for missiles both yielded valuable evidence about Iran's nuclear past as well as its decision in 2003 to suspend the weapons side of its program.
But there was no "eureka" moment, according to senior officials who helped supervise the collection efforts. The surge in intelligence-gathering helped convince analysts that Iran had made a "course correction" in 2003, halting the weapons work while proceeding with the civilian nuclear energy program.
The result, ironically, was a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that reached conclusions far different from what many intelligence officials expected.
"One reason this is actually an intelligence success is that when we got additional information that could lead to a different conclusion, we had an ability to move in that direction," said a senior intelligence official involved in the drafting process.
Former and current intelligence officials say the new NIE reflects new analytical methods ordered by McConnell -- who took the DNI job in January -- and his deputies, including Thomas Fingar, a former head of the State Department's intelligence agency, and Donald M. Kerr, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and an expert on nuclear weapons technology.
Besides requiring greater transparency about the sources of intelligence, McConnell and his colleagues have compelled analysts working on major estimates to challenge existing assumptions when new information does not fit, according to former and current U.S. officials familiar with the policies.
The report also reflects what several officials described yesterday as a new willingness by the intelligence community to analyze intentions in addition to capabilities. While Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity to make nuclear weapons, including knowledge of how to enrich uranium to a level usable in bombs, the new intelligence collected through intercepted communications raised doubts about Iran's intended use of the technology.
As McConnell said in a Nov. 14 speech, it "inserted some new questions" that made the community go back and review the conventional wisdom about Iran. It also shed light on Iran's susceptibility to international diplomatic pressure -- a large factor in Tehran's decision to cut off research on building a bomb, analysts concluded.
McConnell said his objective in preparing the Iran estimate was "to present the clinical evidence and let it stand on its own merits with its own qualification," meaning that it would contain dissent. "There are always disagreements on every National Intelligence Estimate," he said.
He and other officials jettisoned a requirement that each conclusion in an NIE reflect a consensus view of the intelligence community -- a requirement that in the past yielded "lowest-common-denominator judgments," said one senior intelligence official familiar with the reforms.
"We demolished democracy" by no longer reflecting just a majority opinion, "because we felt we should not be determining the credibility of analytic arguments by a raising of hands," the official said. Some analysts, for example, were not "highly confident" that Iran has not restarted its nuclear program, a result reflected in the classified report. Other analysts said Iran was further away from attaining a nuclear weapons capability than the majority said.
DNI officials also pressed for a broader array of intelligence sources, including news accounts and other "open sources" that traditionally had carried little weight inside intelligence agencies. In the case of Iran, critical information was gleaned from non-clandestine sources, such as news photographs taken in 2005 depicting the inner workings of one of Iran's uranium enrichment plants, an official said.
Those photos helped persuade analysts that the Natanz plant was suited to making low-enriched uranium for nuclear energy but not the highly enriched uranium needed for bombs. "You go to wherever you think the answer might be," the official said, "instead of waiting for it to trickle into your top-secret computer system."
Several top officials said McConnell and others were determined to avoid a repetition of the intelligence community's very public failures in assessing Iraq's weapons programs. Not only were its analytical judgments wrong -- U.S. forces in Iraq never found the chemical or biological weapons that the CIA said they would -- but the agency relied on sources known to be suspect or even discredited.
For instance, U.S. claims that Iraq had built mobile biological weapons laboratories were based on more than 100 reports from a single source, an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball" whom U.S. officials never interviewed in person. After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, investigators concluded that Curveball's stories were fabrications.
Then-CIA director George J. Tenet initiated some of the reforms in the wake of the Curveball debacle, but Fingar and McConnell added to them and spread them across the intelligence community, officials said.
Staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...T2007120402524
ok so here are some hypotheses based on the above:
a) the iraq debacle resulted in multi-level legitmation problems---it is hard to separate them into discrete areas because an aspect of the way marketing/political maintenance has massaged these legitimation problems has collapsed them into each other--but anyway it is obvious that as the political--uh--issues spun out that the intelligence community clearly took one for the team.
i find this curious in a way, but rehearsing why would involve a huge digression....anyway, so this report can be understood as that community (en bloc, in general) attempting to relegitimate itself.
the strange thing about this comes in the description of methods: that the intel community is now "reading critically" and "being more cautious about sourcing, " "more transparent concerning what is and is not known"--and it now "willing to question assumptions."
which are all fine in themselves: but what are these "new developments" saying about how intel has functioned up to now?
that they weren't reading critically, that they weren't willing to question assumptions, etc.?
2 options: either (a) a defacto statement--"on iraq we were railroaded" or (b) up to this point, we have not deployed even the most rudimentary critical analysis skills in generating intelligence.
neither of these makes anything any better....
(b) it is curious to see this on the front page of every paper this morning. obviously, what is happening here is that the impact of nic report is being managed.
"well, it's complicated, this intelligence business"
"iran is worse than north korea"
"boy what a tough job we have"
the message seems to be:
you *can't* see in the--uh--gap that separates this report from previous bush-statements on iran evidence of actual disengenousness.
don't think too hard about all this---everything is under control.
watch tv.
have a beer.
spend your xmas dollars.
if this take is correct, then it is simply another demonstration of the multi-functioning press--one that relies on maintaining the overall legitimacy of the political order because its primary legitimate/legitimating function is as loyal opposition.
i am not sure about this, by my impression is that this is sorta new, at least at the level of explicitness.
so what you have is a press the political function of which is to manage scandal that cuts too deep, not reveal it.
for some reason, i am comparing this as i write to what i remember from watergate: watergate was an abuse of power and corruption scandal that cut to the center of the nixon administration while leaving the political order unaffected, except insofar as the administration was atop that order: so resignation was a way of ending the crisis.
this report--coming in the wake of a long series of even bigger debacles that have passed noticed but massaged into some fucked up expanded sense of what is acceptable from the political order---seems to but deeper potentially, to represent a different type of political problem, and so you see the press acting to manage it.
what do you make of this interpretation?
(c) another dimension of response to the report comes in the full-court press on the part of administration functionaries to generate "complexity"--for example the small string of pronouncements from condi rice which amount to "i question the iranian government" which follows in a straight line form bush's "what me worry?" press conference yesterday.
this is obvious "cover your ass" business....the kind of damage control that the administration has had to engage in repeatedly after each of its massive-to-catastrophic fuck ups become so obvious that they cannot be simply denied (think the "intel" that justified the iraq invasion)
what i find distrubing about all this is that it seems a choice has been made--that the political order is necessarily worth protecting, that the administration, because it has CREATED a serious political crisis is therefore worth protecting BECAUSE it is the political order.
this follows from the argument above--which is obviously simple, but still, i wonder about it--that compares this problem to watergate, if only to indicate the difference in type and magnitude of the problems that the bush people have managed to generate.
thing is that it is in the administration's own interests to act as though a crisis generated by its own incompetence, and so one which would affect the administration fundamentally, IS a political crisis of a serious magnitude, but not for the reasons that you might think---i have been considering the idiot response that cowboy george gave yesterday to the question about whether he was worried about a "credibility gap" resulting from this report--his response "i feel spritied, i feel good about life" indicates that he identifies himself, his person, with the political order as a whole.
it's hard to say which is more depressing--that cowboy george, who somehow remains in office and seemingly feels that there is NO disaster brought about by his administration's ineptness or by its overly broad conception of realpolitik that is cause for concern--not to mention resignation, which to my mind is what really should have happened by now--
or a president of the united states who understands HIMSELF to be the embodiment of the political order (what happened to popular sovereignty?)
or the passivity of the public, of all of us, in the face of this.
i'm not sure what could be done to eliminate this sense that so far as "we the people" are concerned anything goes, that "we the people" choose the status quo because it is the status quo and not because we think that political legitimacy is a variable.
but if that is how we think, then there is little difference between the american public now and the argentine public under peron, say.
we choose order because it is order.
because we think that way, anything does, in fact, go.
it's a bit unnerving.
show me that i am wrong in this.