There’s still the major issue of why the Iran NIE was allowed to see the light of day, and while I believe it was deliberate, WHY it was deliberate is a separate issue.
Josh Marshall has a theory…
There are, oversimplifying, two threads going around, one that the ‘Iran doesn’t have an active program’ preliminary finding was circulating in the Administration in late ’06 (Hersh, etc), and the other that Bush was told about the upcoming finding in August by McConnell, after which he changed his characterization so as not to be so obviously lying about the nature of the threat (all the while still intentionally leaving a grossly misleading impression).
The two threads can be reconciled. The basis for the findings had, indeed, been circulating beginning in late 2006, and ever since. One has to assume that Cheney and his forces marshaled full fire on those findings, and successfully suppressed them, preventing their release. That effort, however, eventually failed, probably due to intelligence and Pentagon unwillingness to take the fall for another war.
What happened in early August was not that Bush learned of the findings, but that McConnell informed him that the NIE containing the findings would be released. Those on the side of releasing them (which had to have included Gates) simply won the battle, and either faced down Cheney, threatened to resign if they lost or utilized whatever other strategy required. It was not the discovery of the underlying truth of the findings that caused the change in rhetoric (becoming more vague on Iran’s nuclear status, but more bellicose on Iran generally). It was the realization that the NIE would become public.
I think this theory has some serious merit. One one side you have SecDef Gates and Admiral McConnell, on the other is Dick Cheney. Somehow, Gates and McConnell won and the NIE was released. Whether or not it was to keep us out of another war I don’t know.
But McConnell’s the one paying the price.
Republicans who accepted with open arms the 2002 assessment of Iraq’s weapons capabilities — which was later shown to be flawed — that led to a US invasion of that country have suddenly grown skeptical of a newly released report on Iran that is seen as tamping down calls for military action there.
Legislation is expected in the Senate next week that would establish a bipartisan, political commission to examine the conclusions of this week’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iran and evaluate the raw intelligence that formed it, the Washington Post reports Friday.
That WaPo report makes it clear the target is the intel community.
Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the conclusions of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as well as the specific intelligence that went into it, according to congressional sources.
The move is the first official challenge, but it comes amid growing backlash from conservatives and neoconservatives unhappy about the assessment that Iran halted a clandestine nuclear weapons program four years ago. It reflects how quickly the NIE has become politicized, with critics even going after the analysts who wrote it, and shows a split among Republicans.
Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) said he plans to introduce legislation next week to establish a commission modeled on a congressionally mandated group that probed a disputed 1995 intelligence estimate on the emerging missile threat to the United States over the next 15 years.
“Iran is one of the greatest threats in the world today. Getting the intelligence right is absolutely critical, not only on Iran’s capability but its intent. So now there is a huge question raised, and instead of politicizing that report, let’s have a fresh set of eyes — objective, yes — look at it,” he said in an interview.
Ensign’s proposal calls for Senate leaders to put an equal number of Republicans and Democrats on a panel to study the NIE and report back in six months. “There are a lot of people out there who do question [the NIE]. There is a huge difference between the 2005 and 2007 estimates,” he said. The 2005 intelligence estimate reported that Iran was still working on a clandestine military program, and the new assessment basically says the previous judgment was wrong on a key point.
So what’s going on? People have crossed Dick Cheney before, generals and intelligence officials have disputed that Iran is a threat. They’ve been in the background, but they’ve prevented any military action against Tehran so far.
What’s going on here is the Israeli/AIPAC lobby is now throwing its full weight behind discrediting not only the NIE but those in the Pentagon and intel communities who are against another war. The Likudnik branch of Israel’s government and the powerful lobby that works for them in the US wants Bush to hit Iran, period. Nobody in Washington crosses this lobby lightly, and the result is that those who may have prevented a war with Iran — a war that could possibly involve nuclear weapons — are now in the crosshairs of the hawks on both sides of the aisle.
Not more than 72 hours after John Bolton demanded a congressional witch hunt into burying these whistleblowers, we have the Senate Republicans demanding a bi-partisan commission to go after those responsible for the NIE. There’s plenty of things the Democrats would be able to investigate about the CIA over the last 7 years, but suddenly the GOP is all gung-ho about attacking everything the CIA has done.
“If it’s inaccurate, it could result in very serious damage to legitimate American policy,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). As recently as July, he noted, intelligence officials said in congressional testimony that they had a high degree of confidence that Iran was intent on developing the world’s deadliest weapon. “We need to update our conclusions, but this is a substantial change,” he said in an interview.
That takes the cake of course. Senator Sessions is suddenly worried about how our Middle East intel might be “inaccurate” almost six years after our invasion of Iraq based on…inaccurate intel. It was inaccurate because it was in some cases completely manufactured…but because this assessment doesn’t give us carte blanche to bomb Tehran, NOW we have to worry about intel accuracy?
And the crazy part of this is that the legislation to form the committee will certainly pass, casting enough doubt on the intel community to discredit those would stop us from going into war with Iran.
