The Israel Lobby And Iran

I mentioned the Swift Boating of Chas Freeman and its implications on US/Israel policy. Andrew Sullivan thinks he's found a nut and has divined the real reason there was such vicious pushback on Freeman, who was clearly qualified for the job. There is a pretty big under-the-radar battle right now between Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, who recommended Freeman for the job of National Intelligence Council head, and the hard right in Israel, and this mainly concerns intelligence on Iran. Blair testified in an open session on Tuesday that Iran has not weaponized uranium or restarted its nuclear capacity. And frankly, the Israelis don't like what they hear.

Iran has not produced the highly enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon and has not decided to do so, U.S. intelligence officials told Congress yesterday, an assessment that contrasts with a stark Israeli warning days earlier that Iran has crossed the "technological threshold" in its pursuit of the bomb.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said that Iran has not decided to pursue the production of weapons-grade uranium and the parallel ability to load it onto a ballistic missile [...]

Israeli officials have a different view of Iran's goals.

"Reaching a military-grade nuclear capability is a question of synchronizing its strategy with the production of a nuclear bomb," Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, Israel's chief of military intelligence, told cabinet ministers, according to a senior Israeli official briefing reporters in Jerusalem. "Iran continues to stockpile hundreds of kilograms of low-level enriched uranium and hopes to use the dialogue with the West to buy the time it requires in order to move towards an ability to manufacture a nuclear bomb."

Blair said Israel was working from the same facts but had drawn a different interpretation of their meaning.

"The Israelis are far more concerned about it, and they take more of a worst-case approach to these things from their point of view," he said.

And so, extrapolating from that, Sullivan makes a succinct but compelling argument that the Israel lobby is trying to show their power to Blair, and by extension influence the internal debate on Iran.

The blackballing of Freeman is also about the intimidation of Blair. My concern remains that many of the same people that led us into the groupthink that gave us the worst intelligence blunder in American history are now dictating who gets to review intelligence for the next historic analysis: on Iran. I realized my mistake and have tried to adjust to allow for it. Others have dug in more deeply.

There's no question that the Israel lobby used the blackballing of Freeman to aggrandize their power in Washington and with the Obama Administration. In Walter Pincus' article, an AIPAC spokesman was outed as providing material about Freeman on background to reporters (good for Pincus). But character assassination is one thing. If there really is an attempt to hijack the interpretation of key data about the scope of the Iranian threat, it needs to be pummeled into sand.

The Administration's public statements on Iran have been a mix of carrots and sticks - and they've candidly spoken on both sides of the nuclear issue. Yet at the same time they may be seeking supply routes for Afghanistan through the country, inviting the country to international conferences, etc. It sounds to me like there's an internal struggle, and the Israel lobby is trying to gain a foothold. Needless to say, the result of either the US or Israel attempting to "take out" Iranian nuclear facilities would be catastrophic for the region and the world. It's simply incredible that we have to even fight this battle again, but Washington doesn't learn easily.

The Lost Reports

There's a new study on Afghanistan warning of impending crisis, with an ineffective government losing power and influence to the Taliban, full-scale corruption and severe breakdowns in security. But there's also a report on Iraq that dampens the boasts of victory through surge that we keep hearing.

WASHINGTON -- A nearly completed high-level U.S. intelligence analysis warns that unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing the major security and political gains achieved over the last year.

U.S. officials familiar with the new National Intelligence Estimate said they were unsure when the top-secret report would be completed and whether it would be published before the Nov. 4 presidential election.

Um, I can assure you that it won't be.

The report lays out the structural challenges which have let to be dealt with:

U.S. officials say last year's surge of 30,000 troops, all of whom have been withdrawn, was just one reason for the improvements. Other factors include the truce declared by anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of an Iran-backed Shiite Muslim militia; and the enlistment of former Sunni insurgents in Awakening groups created by the U.S. military to fight al-Qaida in Iraq and other extremists.

The draft NIE, however, warns that the improvements in security and political progress, such as the recent passage of a provincial-election law, are threatened by lingering disputes between the majority Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, Kurds and other minorities, the U.S. officials said.

Sources of tension identified by the NIE, they said, include a struggle between Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen for control of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk; and the Shiite-led central government's unfulfilled vows to hire former Sunni insurgents who joined Awakening groups.

McCain will use this to walk that "we're winning but have not yet won" tightrope and argue that withdrawal equals surrender. But in actuality, our presence has done nothing to reduce sectarian tensions apart from the violence. The NIE is saying that the conditions still exist for civil war or sectarian strife, and having our troops act as a proxy army for Maliki, who wants to be a strongman, actually exacerbates the problem, increases frustrations, and heightens instability. Nobody has forced the factions to come together and reconcile - in fact, Bush decentralized the government but simultaneously empowered Maliki's militia and has now handed over control of the Sunni Awakening forces to him, which is bound to shock the system as the Prime Minister tries to consolidate power. Creating what amounts to a theocratic dictatorship allied with Iran is not a good prospect for Iraq or the world, and makes hollow the focus on violence and security in the short term.

Peter Galbraith makes a similar point in the New York Review of Books:

Less violence, however, is not the same thing as success. The United States did not go to war in Iraq for the purpose of ending violence between contending sectarian forces. Success has to be measured against US objectives. John McCain proclaims his goal to be victory and says we are now winning in Iraq (a victory that will, of course, be lost if his allegedly pro-surrender opponent wins). He considers victory to be an Iraq that is "a democratic ally." George W. Bush has defined victory as a unified, democratic, and stable Iraq. Neither man has explained how he will transform Iraq's ruling theocrats into democrats, diminish Iran's vast influence in Baghdad, or reconcile Kurds and Sunnis to Iraq's new order. Remarkably, neither the Democrats nor the press has challenged them to do so [...]

From 2003 until 2007, the Bush administration helped Iraq's most pro-Iranian Shiite religious parties take and consolidate power. Naturally, the Shiites—and their Iranian backers—welcomed the US involvement, at least temporarily. Now the United States is putting heavier pressure on al-Maliki to include the Sunni enemy in Iraq's security forces. It has created a Sunni army that, as long as the US remains in Iraq, can only grow in strength. Al-Maliki and his allies want the US out of Iraq because the American presence has become dangerous.

Without American troops, the Iraqi army and police would be able to move against the Awakening. Should Sunni forces prove too powerful, Iran is always available to help [...]

Al-Maliki's agenda is transparent. The Kurds and Sunnis are obstacles to the ruling coalition's ambitions for a Shiite Islamic state. Al-Maliki wants to eliminate the Sunni militia and contain the Kurds politically and geographically. America's interest in defeating al-Qaeda is far less important to him than the Shiite interest in not having a powerful Sunni military that could overthrow Iraq's new Shiite order. The Kurds are too secular, too Western, and too pro-American for the Shiites to share power comfortably with them [...]

John McCain says that partly because of his persistent support of the surge, we are now winning the Iraq war. He defines victory as an Iraq that is a democratic ally. Yet he advocates continued US military support to an Iraqi government led by Shiite religious parties committed to the establishment of an Islamic republic. He takes a harder line on Iran than President Bush, but supports Iraqi factions that are Iran's closest allies in the Middle East. He praises the Awakening and but seems not to have realized that the Iraqi government is intent on crushing it. He has denounced the Obama-Biden plan for a decentralized state but has said nothing about how he would protect Iraq's Kurds, the only committed American allies in the country.

George W. Bush has put the United States on the side of undemocratic Iraqis who are Iran's allies. John McCain would continue the same approach. It is hard to understand how this can be called a success—or a path to victory.

One great tidbit in there is that Maliki was kind of picked up at the last minute by the US when they needed a new Prime Minister, and that initially, they got his first name wrong. Yet in the name of increasing security, we've given him all kinds of power, seemingly ignorant that he's a longtime Dawa Party member who spent 20 years in exile in Iran.

Condi Rice is meanwhile crying that Iraq has been harder than she personally imagined. Perhaps it's because you have to actually pay attention to it.

Hersh's Gambit

I've spent the last two days puzzling over Sy Hersh's latest New Yorker piece about the prospect of war with Iran. There's no question in my mind that the Cheneyites want to be the "real men" who go to Tehran. Fourthbranch Cheney may have lost the skirmish inside the Administration on North Korea, but it's clear the country with the oil in it is the bigger prize, and in a way, has always been the focus.

I know there's a lot of talk about Israel going ahead with an airstrike, but Hersh doesn't buy it, and neither do I. Fourthbranch doesn't believe they have the firepower needed to penetrate the deeply embedded facilities he thinks the Iranians have, and he figures the US would be blamed for any attack anyway, so why not go ahead with it. Furthermore, the Israelis are doing too much talking about this, telegraphing the fact that they don't want to actually do it. If they were serious about attacking, nobody at the New York Times would get briefed about preparatory maneuvers.

About 13 years ago, while working on a British TV magazine program, I found myself spending a couple of days with Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls/the Notorious B.I.G. (I swear, I still have the tape, but it’s analog.) This extended interview took place at the time when Tupac Shakur was yelling from the rooftops that he was going to kill Brooklyn’s greatest rapper, and getting plenty of publicity and selling records by doing so. Biggie wasn’t particularly alarmed. He’d been a hustler in Bed-Stuy for too long to take seriously threats that are broadcast. In far more colorful language, he said words to the effect of “On the streets, when someone is telling anyone who’ll listen that they’re going to kill you, you don’t have to lose any sleep over it. You’re not going to hear about it beforehand when the real killer comes.”

Exactly. (Yes, I know, Biggie was eventually, tragically, murdered — but his point is proven by the fact that his killers had nothing to do with Tupac.)

So Fourthbranch wants to take the shot himself (Israel's even asking them to do it for them, which is the point of all the talk). And if you're someone like Sy Hersh who thinks that is abhorrent, that it would be deeply destabilizing and catastrophic to this country's national security, you do whatever you can to stop it. So he's been reporting about the imminent possibility of an attack, in the hopes that the presence of the articles will become a deterrent. He's revealed that the weapons have been moved into position, the exercises prepped, the bombing routes checked. He knows he can't rely on the Democratic Congress, obviously; as this latest article shows, the only people who have been standing in the way of war with Iran are at the Pentagon.

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.) [...]

Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”

When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”

Hersh is basically writing what he hopes are self-negating columns. He wants the very act of publishing, of making transparent all these efforts to bomb Iran and the pushback, to deter the Administration. This is pretty much Spencer Ackerman's take, and so far, so good.

However, what Hersh is putting up front in this piece is that the war has actually already begun:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

The reason for the Finding, which is yet another hideous example of playing with fire (we're arming and training Sunni fundamentalist Baluchis from the same region as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?), is that the normal blueprint for ginning up a war in the Middle East hasn't worked. Cheney initially took the Iraqi pre-war marketing plan, with neocons in high places going to battle on the op-ed pages and TV, articles about Iranian perfidy strategically placed, and the like. Didn't cause more than a ripple, and after the NIE showing Iran discontinued their nuclear program years ago, dead on arrival. It should be known that the NIE itself, finally released after years of delay and attempted suppression, is now a fading memory in the national consciousness. It's a wonder we got it out at all:

The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.

The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret [...]

"On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all," (his attorney Roy) Krieger said in an interview.

So Plan B was launched - to start a dirty war inside Iran, using enemies of the Iranian government, in the hopes that they can spark an event that the Administration can credibly call an act of aggression. They had to get the go-ahead from the Gang of Eight in Congress, which buckled (again). But they authorized a very different program than Fourthbranch ended up implementing:

Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference [...]

“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight.

Emptywheel has more on this aspect of the White House evading oversight so they can set the fuse for a casus belli. Clearly they want to "prep the battle space" and garner just enough support to go over the heads of the wavering generals and launch the attack of their dreams. And the fact that just talking about this stuff enough raises the price of oil makes it a win even if they lose.

Here's how Fourthbranch tried to get to Hersh the last time he foiled one of his dastardly plans:

...it's May, 1975, and Seymour Hersh of the New York Times has just broke the story of a secret submarine mission inside Soviet territorial waters.

Here's Dick Cheney's handwritten notes on how the Ford administration might proceed next: "go after Hersh papers in his apt."

I don't know what it'll be this time. But it's clear to me, as we approach July 4th, that there's no better patriot in this country than Seymour Hersh, taking on the job of 236 Democrats in the House and 50 in the Senate, trying to hold off this insanity for a few more months before transitioning into a new Adminstration which will hopefully recognize the broad consensus for negotiation and diplomacy with the Islamic Republic as opposed to the folly of war.

Ya Gotta Be Funnin'

You mean to tell me a Bush Administration-authored assessment of the surge is filled with rosy scenarios and half-truths? What a completely emergent pattern! What a stray onto the beaten path!

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Senior Democratic senators challenged a new intelligence report's assessment of President Bush's "surge" strategy Friday, saying the troop increase in Iraq has failed to achieve its strategic goals.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was distributed to key lawmakers this week, sets the stage for the latest public progress report on Iraq that will be delivered Tuesday and Wednesday to congressional committees by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the top U.S. diplomat in Baghdad.

"In my judgment, it's too rosy, but there are parts of it that are not so rosy, and both pieces need to be declassified," Sen. Carl Levin said, pointing in particular to the portion of the report describing Iraq's political progress.

You know that it's bad when even the doctored, rosy report created by the Pentagon has to remain a closely guarded secret. Levin and Kennedy are heading up the effort to get the report declassified.

What could it possibly say in defense of this failed strategy? Violence is down but it's at a plateau and even ticked back up in February and March. The political situation is a mess; Maliki tried to be a tough guy and muscle Sadr out of the picture but his own army defected and eventually Iran - Iran! - had to broker a deal. And his reaction to the slaughter was to add 10,000 Badr Brigade militia forces at a time where Sunni Concerned Local Citizens groups are begging for jobs and are being told that no slots are available for them. There's precious little to be cheery about, and so I expect lying and evasion in place of the difficult truth.

ROSEN: There’s no positive scenario in Iraq these days. Not every situation has a solution.

Rosen also called the United States "an imperialist power." Whatever is needed to wake people up. The surge has failed.

Because We Wouldn't Want THAT Information To Get Out

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says...

Fool me once - by publicly releasing the NIE on Iran showing they gave up their nuclear ambitions four years ago - shame on, shame on you...

Fool me twice...

A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is scheduled to be completed this month, according to U.S. intelligence officials. But leaders of the intelligence community have not decided whether to make its key judgments public, a step that caused an uproar when key judgments in an NIE about Iran were released in November.

...you can't get fooled again.

Intelligence officials said that the National Intelligence Board -- made up of the heads of the 16 intelligence agencies plus McConnell -- will decide whether to release the Iraq judgments once the estimate is completed. But they made clear that they lean toward a return to the traditional practice of keeping such documents secret.

In internal guidance he issued in October, McConnell said that his policy was that they "should not be declassified." One month later, however, the intelligence board decided to publicly release key judgments from an NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons program, saying that it had weighed "the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security against the necessity to protect classified information."

I'm surprised they got the Iran one through. Obviously, the nature of how that blew up in the Administration's face is keeping them from ever doing something so profoundly silly again.

As for the Bushism, I think we have a new winner, and it's about Iraq so it applies:

"I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who were trying to defeat us in Iraq."

Really, just shoot me in the head.

I Don’t Care What The Intelligence Says

Does any sentence sum up the modern conservative movement more?

They’re undoubtedly intent upon nuclear weapons. I don’t care what this latest NIE says. That’s foolishness that represents our own inability to get a handle on it more than anything else.

That was Fred Thompson, going with his gut over established reality and creating it himself.

In a similiar and far more dispiriting vein today was Thomas Friedman, who uses an idiotic analogy (par for the course for him, I know) to suggest we would be better off lying about the reality of Iran's nuclear program in order to make ourselves look tough to the Gulf states. I don't know when it was decided that we should base our foreign policy on how Bahrain would perceive us.

People know that Iran is still enriching uranium, and they know they have the right to do so under the NPT. People know that their enrichment program is actually overblown, and wouldn't produce enough weapons-grade product for a half-decade. People know that the ability to maneuver enriched uranium into a weapon is still a threat - Europe is pretty united on that one. And people know that a good ground for negotiations occurs when one side isn't threatening to blow up the other side every five seconds. Indeed, the toning down of the rhetoric, caused in part by the release of the NIE, is aiding efforts at additional sanctions at the UN.

Friedman doesn't understand this because the words "Suck. On. This." don't appear in such a policy.

Moving Right Along

Looks like Europe is completely on board with a new UN resolution on Iran, and Russia and China could be persuaded to recommend additional sanctions.

The proposal specifically designates the Quds Force, the foreign operations branch of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, for exporting arms prohibited under previous resolutions and for proliferation activity. It is highly unusual for the world body to sanction a military wing of a member state, officials say. The proposed measure would freeze any of its assets abroad, make business dealings with it illegal and isolate it financially, they add.

The Quds Force numbers up to 15,000 and runs Tehran's foreign covert operations, including arms, aid and training for groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Iraq's Shiite militias, U.S. and European officials say [...]

Officials from several countries said the proposal indicates that there is still an appetite for significant new punitive measures against Iran even after the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate last week concluded that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago.

This seems counter-intuitive, but Matt Yglesias thinks that it actually makes a lot of sense.

The fact of the NIE's release seems like a decisive signal that the really nutty war faction inside the Bush administration has been defeated and that policy is being driven by people who are worried about Iranian nuclear activities, but who also have a basic grip on reality. American officials like that are the sort of officials that diplomats around the world are prepared to work with. Foreign officials weren't, however, interested in being used as dupes who were supposed to provide a veneer of cover for an insane military adventure. I bet that if you saw a new administration with a clearer commitment to laying out a path for improved US-Iranian relations, you'd see even more willingness on the part of the international communtiy to contemplate punitive measures if Iran is unresponsive.

It's funny how a belief in the general sanity of the United States can lead to productivity on the global stage. My concern is that the Israelis are less than sane on this issue, and there's still a fair amount of lunacy stateside so that the world community should be a little more skeptical. We haven't done a very good job of checking the desires of the Vice President over here, if you haven't noticed.

UPDATE: Man, if deterrance was back, that'd be a welcome development, but one of the poorer legacies of the Bush Administration is to kind of blot out the very notion of deterrance, and give people the impression that any national effort to block the development of nuclear weapons in Iran, for example, is a necessarily imperialist act.

No Blood For Oil

I think I've figured out why the saber-rattling on Iran has continued apace, despite the NIE: they dropped the dollar.

Iran, the second-biggest producer of crude oil in the Middle East, has "completely halted'' all oil transactions in dollars, the state-run ISNA news agency said, citing Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari.

Nozari said the U.S. currency was no longer reliable as the dollar continues to depreciate. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has set up a team to study pricing oil in another currency, the INSA cited Nozari as saying. The measure is designed to prevent further losses in revenue to oil exporters, ISNA reported.

The war machine often mobilizes to defend our economic interests.

UPDATE: A very troubling consequence of the Bush years is how it has crumbled America's faith in their government. To wit:

Just 18% of American voters believe that Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 66% disagree and say Iran has not stopped its nuclear weapons program. Twenty-one percent (21%) of men believe Iran has stopped the weapons development along with 16% of women.

The survey was conducted following release of a government report saying that Iran halted its nuclear weapons development program in 2003.

The Administration politicized the intel on Iraq, and when it was revealed to be bogus, blamed the intelligence agencies. The learned behavior of the public is to question intelligence. That now works to the warhawks' advantage.

Questioning The Facts That Don't Fit The Dementia

The neocons call for Team B:

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.

If Democrats dare to allow this politicization of the intelligence community, I really have to throw up my hands. But I don't think they will. I must admit to being amused by this freak-out on the right, where conflicting opinions MUST be wrong and must be challenged. If the NIE says Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program, the NIE must be doctored. Contrary opinions don't exist.

The truth is that the nation's intelligence professionals understand that Iran retains key capabilities to restart a nuclear program, and may do so. But the NIE reflects an assessment of the facts as they are, not as neocon warmongers wish them to be.

What's breathtaking is how the Administration is truly acting as if nothing happened. They're still moving forward on a missile defense program that is now simply ludicrous, as nobody has the capability to launch missiles that the program would purport to shoot down (even though it can't). They're still seeking support for sanctions against the Islamic Republic, and they're actually receiving that support.

"Iran continues to represent a threat," Mrs (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel said during a joint news conference with Mr Sarkozy in Paris.

She did not specifically express support for a new UN sanctions resolution against Iran, which the US is calling for.

"We and our partners would like to continue with the UN process," Mrs Merkel said.

"I think we and our partners need to continue to seek dialogue with Iran," she said.

Mr (French President Nicolas) Sarkozy said he agreed with his German counterpart that Iran still posed a danger, and that he supported the push for more sanctions.

"Notwithstanding the latest elements, everyone is fully conscious of the fact that there is a will of the Iranian leaders to obtain nuclear weapons.

"What made Iran move up to now, it was sanctions and firmness," he said.

Look, the neocons have been wrong about every foreign policy challenge of the last 50 years. They make things up whenever the facts don't fit their politics. The great danger is that the people in power act based on those self-created facts. Frankly, let's see some hearings on the Iran NIE. I'd love to know why the report was delayed for about a year. I'd love to know why the President first said that he was informed about changes in the intelligence on Iran in August, but he wasn't told what the changes were. I'd love to know if this speculation is true.

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.

Bang that gavel. Thanks, Sen. Ensign.

Critical Mass On Bush's Demonstrable Lies

The acknowledgment that Mr. Bush was indeed briefed that Iran's nuclear program may have been suspended back in August, yet he continued the saber-rattling for months thereafter, is starting to provoke a blistering reaction in the media. And today we've learned that Fourthbranch had the intel for two weeks and, if you believe the White House, didn't mention it to his boss:

In the end, American intelligence officials rejected that theory, though they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to the most senior members of President Bush’s national security team, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

“It was a pretty vivid exchange,” said one participant in the conversation.

And I still think the press should be asking: if Dick had seen--and twisted the arms of--this intelligence two weeks ago, then why didn't he even tell Bush about it? Or did he?

Actually, surprisingly, they are asking that today. And they're wondering about the timeline, essentially what did the President know and when did he know it. In a seminal piece, Dan Froomkin details how you can pinpoint when Bush was told to change his rhetoric subtly enough to react to the new information.

But a close examination of his word choice over the past year suggests that he learned something around August that got him to stop making claims that were apparently no longer supported by American intelligence.

Instead of directly condemning Iranian leaders for pursuing nuclear weapons, he started more vaguely accusing them of seeking the knowledge necessary to make such a weapon.

Even as he did that, however, he and the vice president accelerated their rhetorical efforts to persuade the public that the nuclear threat posed by Iran was grave and urgent. Bush went so far in late August and October as to warn of the potential for a nuclear holocaust.

Indeed, a careful parsing of Bush's words indicates that, while not saying anything that could later prove to be demonstrably false, Bush left his listeners with what he likely knew was a fundamentally false impression. And he did so in the pursuit of a more muscular and possibly even military approach to a Middle Eastern country.

It's an oddly familiar pattern of deception.

You can dive into the piece for the details.

The White House is really in a bind now. Without the lesson of Iraq, and the hyping of intelligence, the cherry-picking of data, the entire m.o. laid out to the world, perhaps the nation's radar wouldn't be at attention. But nobody believes this President anymore. Nobody gives him the benefit of the doubt. And that's simply because he doesn't deserve it. He and his minions clearly knew about additional information on Iran's nuclear program at a time when they were amping up the rhetoric in order to put the country on a path to yet another war. It's a familiar and dastardly script.

P.S. See Keith Olbermann's special comment, it breaks this all down with laser-like perceptiveness.

Huckabee's Troubling Ignorance

The Wayne Dumond story has the Huckabee campaign in serious damage control mode. Still, this is a 10 year-old story that the Governor managed to overcome in Arkansas in two elections. I'm far more interested in the fallout of Huckabee's utter ignorance, not only on the Iran NIE, but on foreign policy altogether. The less-remarked-upon part of the deer in the headlights meeting with reporters was where he decides to just answer by saying something some dude on the street told him.

I don’t know where the intelligence is coming from that says they have suspended the program or how credible that is versus the view that they actually are expanding it. … And I’ve heard, the last two weeks, supposed reports that they are accelerating it and it could be having a reactor in a much shorter period of time than originally been thought.

As Juan Cole notes, this suggests that Huckabee doesn't know what a National Intelligence Estimate is. Also, he thinks the problem is Iran having a "reactor," when that would be for civilian energy purposes, which is not only fully legal under the Nonproliferation Treaty to which Iran is a signatory, but is the kind of nuclear power that is in Huckabee's own energy plan.

Sarah Posner adds:

His shoestring campaign, to my knowledge, doesn't have any foreign policy advisers, and Huckabee is more interested in reaching out to apocalyptic end-timers like Kenneth Copeland and Tim LaHaye, for whom the only sound Middle East policy is found in the Book of Revelation, or encrypted in various parts of the Old Testament, which many end-timers believe foretell Christ's birth, death, resurrection, and return.

We're coming up on eight years of someone who doesn't know a thing about foreign policy. Do we really need another four?

Pass The Popcorn

Harry Reid:

“I am growing increasingly concerned about the White House’s inconsistent explanations of when the President was told about important new intelligence information regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions. It appears the President and Vice President were briefed in August on this information, before both the President and Vice President began to ratchet up their increasingly-heated rhetoric on the threat of Iran.

“I urge the White House to fully and accurately explain what the President and Vice President knew and when they knew it, and why the Administration’s rhetoric was not adjusted when presented with new data this summer.

As I said earlier, the information that's starting to trickle out will be devastating. CNN is now reporting:

President Bush was told in August that Iran's nuclear weapons program "may be suspended," the White House said Wednesday, which seemingly contradicts the account of the meeting given by Bush Tuesday.

Adm. Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told Bush the new information might cause intelligence officials to change their assessment of the Iranian program, but said analysts needed to review the new data before making a final judgment, White House press secretary Dana Perino said late Wednesday.

"Director McConnell said that the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran's covert nuclear program, but the intelligence community was not prepared to draw any conclusions at that point in time, and it wouldn't be right to speculate until they had time to examine and analyze the new data," Perino said in a statement issued by the White House.

This doesn't come from a whistleblower, this is from Dana Perino's own statement.

All of the spinning by discredited figures like John Bolton (who actually argues today that the intelligence community is too focused on "the latest hot tidbit" of information - you mean like Curveball?) is a lot of noise. The truth is that Bush has been exposed as lying abut Iran just as he was lying about Iraq. His contention that the NIE proves that Iran had a nuclear program in 2003 means this:

What it really means is that faced with two neighbors in the spring of 2003 who both harbored nuclear ambitions, we invaded the country without an active WMD program while ignoring the one that did. I'm not suggesting we should have invaded Iran instead, but by the Administration's own reckoning, we should have.

It puts an exclamation point on the colossal folly of our Iraq adventure.

I didn't think we were headed for hearings on this, but now it's looking more and more that way. This was another attempt to lie us into war.

UPDATE: Haaretz is saying that the Israelis knew about the NIE for a month. It's not credible that the President didn't know about it, but a foreign entity did.

UPDATE II: Why isn't Joe Klein run out of America on a rail? He claims that the Administration has shown a tremendous bit of candor in releasing the report. Candor? They blocked it for a year and lied about when they knew about it!

A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing

There's an enormous danger in having a conservative movement so committed to their own failed beliefs that they are contempuous of information that conflicts with it, or the government professionals who practice their trade. This is exactly the kind of bullcrap we saw in the run-up to Iraq. Any contradictory information was dismissed because "Saddam's a liar, you can't trust anything that comes out of that country!" And now...

Last night on PBS’s Charlie Rose, former senator Fred Thompson added his own conspiracy theory to the mix, stating that Iran may have deliberately “leaked” the information on their lack of nuclear program to distract the U.S. “Nobody knows” if Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, he declared:

"We’re just going to have to wait and see, why they would start it up and move away without telling anybody. Unless of course they have leaked this themselves. So, just a bunch of unanswered questions. […]

This is perhaps a weak, faint attempt to cause us to divert our attention a little bit from what they’re doing."

These people don't understand intelligence and don't understand government. We got a retired Iranian general to flip and give us new intel, and it revealed that the nuclear weapons program was put on ice in 2003. Even Dick Cheney is accepting that.

“I don’t have any reason to question what the [intelligence] community has produced,” he said. “Now, there are things they don’t know. There’s always the possibility that circumstances will change. But I think they’ve done the best job they can with the intelligence that’s available.”

Now, Cheney also thinks Iraq will be self-governing by 2009 (they are NOW, you idjit), so he's got his own problems. And the entire Administration could be climbing down from the precipice of what would be a catastrophic war. But the point is this: people who are more wedded to their ideology than the truth need to be drummed out of public life.

UPDATE: I just saw Frank Gaffney on Hardball argue for a "Team B" intelligence assessment to challenge the NIE. Team B, of course, was even more wrong than the CIA about the Soviet Union's capabilities. Pat Buchanan asked Gaffney if he was calling for a Team B to the NIE on Iran in 2005, when the intelligence community thought there was a nuclear program. He said "No, because I agreed with it."

There you have it, folks. The conservative ideology explained: agree only with what validates your ideology, and question every other fact.

What a First-Rate Operation

Here's Mike Huckabee, maybe a week or so away from being your Republican frontrunner, on the biggest international news story on the planet:

Kuhn: I don’t know to what extent you have been briefed or been able to take a look at the NIE report that came out yesterday ...

Huckabee: I’m sorry?

Kuhn: The NIE report, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. Have you been briefed or been able to take a look at it —

Huckabee: No.

Kuhn: Have you heard of the finding?

Huckabee: No.

OK, a guy's out campaigning all day, maybe he doesn't pick up on the breaking news. But nobody from his communications staff prepares him for an on-the-record interview? They don't think that, you know, CURRENT EVENTS might come up?

Between this and the third party robocalling and the Wayne Dumond thing back in the news, suddenly Mr. Meteoric Rise looks about to leave a crater.

Here's Mike Huckabee, maybe a week or so away from being your Republican frontrunner, on the biggest international news story on the planet:

Kuhn: I don’t know to what extent you have been briefed or been able to take a look at the NIE report that came out yesterday ...

Huckabee: I’m sorry?

Kuhn: The NIE report, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. Have you been briefed or been able to take a look at it —

Huckabee: No.

Kuhn: Have you heard of the finding?

Huckabee: No.

OK, a guy's out campaigning all day, maybe he doesn't pick up on the breaking news. But nobody from his communications staff prepares him for an on-the-record interview? They don't think that, you know, CURRENT EVENTS might come up?

Between this and the third party robocalling and the Wayne Dumond thing back in the news, suddenly Mr. Meteoric Rise looks about to leave a crater.

UPDATE: The Chicago Tribune has a story on this, as well as The Hotline. This is not going to be pretty.

"I don't know where the intelligence is coming from that says that they suspended the program and how credible that is versus the news that they actually are expanding it," he said. "And then I've heard the last two weeks supposed reports that say that they are accelerating and could be having a reactor in a much shorter period of time than originally they thought."

"I don't know where these boys with their newfangled machinery and techno-wizardry get off saying Iran doesn't have a n- CIA? What's that, a new pro cockfighting league? 16 intelligence agencies? Get out of town. Far as I know, we only got one higher intelligence, and that's the good Lord Jesus Christ!"

Lies And The Lying Liars

Bush's statement at today's press conference that he heard about "new information" about Iran's nuclear designs in August but he wasn't told what that information was is an absolute whopper. Why then did he subtly change his words, then, as early as October, from having to stop Iran's nuclear program to having to stop Iran's KNOWLEDGE of a nuclear weapon?

The information that will trickle out in the next couple weeks will be very important to establishing the record.

...Hadley responded by saying that the NIE was only completed in the last two weeks and it rests on “new intelligence”–presumably newer than October 17–which pushed the analysts over the line and caused them to close their judgments on the issue.

Is this true? That will be a subject for further study. But one highly reliable intelligence community source I consulted immediately after Hadley spoke answered my question this way: “This is absolutely absurd. The NIE has been in substantially the form in which it was finally submitted for more than six months. The White House, and particularly Vice President Cheney, used every trick in the book to stop it from being finalized and issued. There was no last minute breakthrough that caused the issuance of the assessment.”

Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell are hammering this very point right now. And she just revealed that the briefers are claiming that Bush indeed was briefed about these reports. Bush looks like either the most incurious person on the face of the Earth (which he is, but even MORE so) or just a bold-faced liar. And Joe Biden is making a bright line.

“Are you telling me a president who is briefed every single morning, who is fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the United States government said they had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in ’03?” Biden said in a conference call with reporters.

“That’s not believable,” Biden added. “I refuse to believe that. If that’s true, he has the most incompetent staff in … modern American history and he’s one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.”

Let's be clear. For the last several years the President has consistently lied about Iran's nuclear program. He claimed that we needed to inflame tensions with Russia by building a missile defense system to protect Europe from this nuclear program. Today he claimed that we were on a diplomatic track with the Iranians before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election. That's a complete lie. Bush called Iran part of the Axis of Evil in 2002. He rebuffed Iranian efforts to negotiate a settlement in 2003. This was years before the mayor of Tehran came on the scene.

Joe Biden is on Hardball right now claiming that we went into Iraq to dominate the Middle East through permanent military bases to control oil. And he beat back Andrea Mitchell by saying that the intelligence community didn't get it wrong in Iraq, the intelligence was misused. And he restated that, if the President takes the nation to war with Iran outside his Constitutional authority, he would lead an effort to impeach him. Welcome to the Dirty Fucking Hippie crowd, Joe.

UPDATE: See also how many in the press lazily parroted the Administration line on Iran for years. They make this crap up as they go along, and they should simply not be trusted on any issue of national security.

And also, a note of caution, from Scott Horton at Harper's.

(An intelligence official) speculated, however, that a hardening of attitudes within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the intelligence community, and in Israel against the plans for an air war in Iran had caused Cheney and his team to fold their cards. “But I’d leave that with a final note of caution,” the source added, “Cheney sometimes appears to give up, but he’s a tenacious son-of-a-bitch. He may very well be back at it tomorrow.”

UPDATE II: Sy Hersh clears up the nonsense, says that the government has been sitting on this NIE for over a year.



Somehow George Bush wasn't privy to any of this.

The Candidates on the Iran NIE

Before yesterday, the real debate on the Republican side was whether to use conventional or tactical nuclear weapons to bomb Iran, and they seemed knocked back a bit by it, while still trying to maintain their warmongering ways.

“For years now, the Islamic Republic of Iran has defied and played games with every international effort aimed at persuading the country to halt enriching uranium,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, said in a statement. “Sanctions and other pressures must be continued and stepped up until Iran complies by halting enrichment activities in a verifiable way.”

Apparently, the intelligence community has been deceived. Dirty lying Iranians!

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, has taken a slightly different line on Iran than his rivals, often focusing on reports that it was supplying weapons to militias in Iraq that were being used against American troops (which have also been proven false -ed.).

Mr. McCain said the release of the report was such a “rare occasion” that he would still “have to try and make sense of it” before commenting in depth. But he did say that Iran was still bent on the destruction of Israel and on interfering in Iraq, and that therefore the sanctions against Tehran were appropriate. Referring to the war in Iraq, he said, “We were deceived by intelligence reports in that situation,” and because of that, the public is “justifiably skeptical.”

"Because I lied to you about Iraq, my friends, all intelligence is suspect, and I'm free to tell you anything I want without fear of contradiction." That's almost a deliberate "Peter and the Wolf" situation; the intelligence community "cried wolf" on Iraq, so they can't be believed EVER AGAIN (except they didn't cry wolf, they were overwhelmed by neocon infiltrators setting up their own intelligence shops inside the Pentagon and Dick Cheney forcing them to change their conclusions).

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the responses were telling. While Barack Obama harkened back to 2002, noting that the classified NIE on Iraq contained some skepticism about the case for WMD and that lawmakers must read the intelligence before coming to conclusions (Clinton and Edwards admitted they hadn't), and John Edwards took it as a lesson that we should "avoid radical steps like the Kyl-Lieberman bill declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, which needlessly took us closer to war." Kyl-Lieberman was a deliberate attempt to move the goalposts and focus on Iranian meddling in Iraq, with the proof on nukes already collapsing.

But the Clinton response was decidedly different.

The assessment of the NIE vindicates the policy Senator Clinton will pursue as President: vigorous American-led diplomacy, close international cooperation, and effective economic pressure, with the prospect of carefully calibrated incentives if Iran addresses our concerns. Neither saber rattling nor unconditional meetings with Ahmadinejad will stop Iran's nuclear ambitions. Senator Clinton has the strength and experience to conduct the kind of vigorous diplomacy needed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

There's very little tamping down of the rhetoric here, just an opportunity to use the phrases "stop Iran's nuclear ambitions," which apparently are already stopped. This is Clinton needing to sound hawkish even in the face of dovish information.

But the candidate that has this right, actually, is Joe Biden.

Biden, a Delaware senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, referred to a newly released U.S. intelligence assessment finding that Iran - despite the Bush administration's assertions otherwise - has not restarted its nuclear weapons program. There is "a significant window of opportunity in which to act to avoid the stark choice of either war, or a nuclear Iran," he said.

The Constitution demands that the president consult Congress on decisions about going to war, he said. "That's why I want to be very clear: If the President takes us to war with Iran without congressional approval, I will call for his impeachment," Biden said.

Blowing By The Truth

So yesterday, the consensus of the nation's intelligence agencies, with a high degree of confidence, was that Iran stopped any efforts to gain nuclear weapons years ago and are several years away from having one should they opt to work toward one. In the real world, this was a bombshell. In the demented world of a rogue President, it didn't mean a thing.

George Bush today ruled out a change in Washington's Iran policy following the declassification yesterday of a US intelligence report that concluded Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.

The US president denied the national intelligence estimate (NIE) - which said Tehran's determination to develop nuclear weapons "is less ... than we have been judging" - had undercut his administration's repeated assertions that Iran was building nuclear weapons.

"Iran was dangerous. Iran is dangerous. And Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," Bush told his first White House press conference in nearly seven weeks.

"Knowledge" is the key word here. The goalposts have just been shifted. If Iran has the "knowledge" to build a nuclear program, they must be attacked. And by the way, if they were on the Internet when Peter Hoekstra published plans for how to build a nuclear weapon, then they know how to make one. Knowledge and intention are hundreds of miles apart.

But not to George Bush. Because the case for intention has been completely discredited by his own spooks. So now he's falling back to knowledge. It was the same thing they did with Iraq, first we knew they had weapons, then we knew they had weapons programs, then we knew they had a weapons book, then a weapons hankerin', then a fever for the flavor of a weapon...

The public isn't going to back a war over knowledge. Without a nuclear program, there's also no target, which means that the warhawks calling for airstrikes just want to level the country. And further reports show that these nutjobs can't believe the truth because it doesn't conform to their biases:

Several of those involved in preparing the new assessment said that when intelligence officials began briefing senior members of the Bush administration on the intercepts, beginning in July, the policymakers expressed skepticism. Several of the president's top advisers suggested the intercepts were part of a clever Iranian deception campaign, the officials said.

Intelligence officers then spent months examining whether the new information was part of a well-orchestrated ruse. Their effort included "Red Team" exercises in which groups of intelligence officers tried to punch holes in the new evidence, substantially delaying publication of the NIE.

The White House is banking on the public not understanding the difference between a civilian nuclear energy program being done in internationally supervised sites and a scary scary nuclear program. They managed to delay the truth but not submarine it, a triumph of intelligence agencies badly burned by the cooked books on Iraq. I believe there's a reason Bob Gates asked for a surge of diplomacy and increased funding for the State Department. He is a bit less crazy than the neocons, and he gets that peace and stability are a positive development, not a threat to be spun.

UPDATE: It's worth noting that the President lied again when saying that he was told about "new information" regarding Iran back in August or September, but he WASN'T TOLD WHAT THAT INFORMATION WAS. See, he was out of the loop, being the President and all.

Liars

According to Stephen Hadley, Bush learned about the NIE's key judgment on Iran a few months ago. Didn't matter - he still continued to pretend that Iran was about to pull the nuclear trigger any second now and start WWIII.

What you have to conclude from this is that the Administration, and really neoconservatives in general, HAVE NO INTEREST in global peace and security. When good news comes from the intelligence community (and the more I read, the more I think the intelligence community pushed for this to come out on their own; they didn't want to get burned like they did in 2002), the immediate reaction is to ignore it because good news doesn't serve their goals. I wish some leading Democrat would make this argument, and loudly.

UPDATE: Indeed, this news about Iran comes at a time when leading neocon Richard Perle is actively recruiting exiles for regime change in both Iran and Syria, in much the way that he helped groom noted fabulist Ahmad Chalabi for power. The new figures have just as little credibility.

The Big Question

We know that Dick Cheney and his White House functionaries sought to delay the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that today has exploded onto the scene. So Kevin Drum is right to ask these questions:

This NIE was apparently finished a year ago, and its basic parameters were almost certainly common knowledge in the White House well before that. This means that all the leaks, all the World War III stuff, all the blustering about the IAEA — all of it was approved for public consumption after Cheney/Bush/Rice/etc. knew perfectly well it was mostly baseless.

Why were the key judgments finally released? Cheney didn't want them released, Bush surely didn't want them released, and DNI Mike McConnell told Congress a few weeks ago that he didn't want them released. So who did?

These are great questions for a reporter to explore. That is, if they stop writing headlines like "Iran STILL Capable Of Nuclear Weapons!"

In addition, Matt Yglesias notes that not only does this square with all contemporaneous reports about Iran from intelligence experts, but it squares with Iran's offer in 2003 of a grand bargain with the United States, with the exchange of the dismantling of their nuclear ambitions for stronger diplomatic ties and removing sanctions. The international community brought this about in Iran, not the invasion of Iraq, but the point is that a deal on Iran was extremely possible in 2003, and the regime is actually concerned with international prestige and security guarantees, and not the irrational "wild men" which is the neocons' preferred portrayal.

When more information trickles out about how this NIE got released, and it almost certainly will, things should get VERRRRY interesting.

UPDATE: I should mention that Drum believes it was Congressional pressure, particularly from the Democrats, that forced the release. If that's true, all that I have to say is that elections have consequences.

NIE Says Iran Halted Its Nuclear Program In 2003

CNN just reported this, and here's an AP article which has a headline that belies the major revelation.

US Officials: Iran has nuke capability

WASHINGTON—Iran halted its nuclear weapons development program in the fall of 2003 under international pressure but is continuing to enrich uranium, which means it may still be able to develop a weapon between 2010 and 2015, senior intelligence officials said Monday.

Barbara Starr at the Pentagon reported that the centrifuges appear to be malfunctioning, and Iran is not likely to be able to produce the material necessary to create a nuclear weapon.

This is a major blow to propaganda efforts to start yet another war in the Middle East. And this is part of the unclassified summary of the report, which the Cheney Administration has been trying to bottle up for some time.

"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," states the unclassified summary of the secret report, released Monday.

Officials said the new findings suggest that diplomacy was effective in containing Iran's nuclear ambitions.

"This is good news in that the U.S. policy coupled with the policies and actions of those who have been our partners appear to have had some success. Iran seems to have been pressured," one of the officials said. "Given that good news we don't want to relax. We want to keep those pressures up."

Stunning news. I'll have more in a bit.

UPDATE: Mark Mazzetti of the NYT has more.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to be explosive in the middle of tense international negotiations aimed at getting Iran to halt its nuclear energy program, and in the middle of a presidential campaign during which a possible military strike against Iran's nuclear program has been discussed.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran's ultimate intentions about gaining a nuclear weapon remain unclear, but that Iran's "decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs."

The wingnut response is going to be BALLISTIC. They're going to say, as they did with Iraq, "if they weren't seeking nukes, why were they hiding their intentions?" This has an obvious answer: ambiguity would be useful in negotiations and could stop attacks. We saw that North Korea's nukes yielded negotiations; Iraq's lack of nukes yielded attack.

UPDATE II: The White House is spinning that Iran is still "keeping the door open" to develop nuclear weapons, and that the risk of acquiring nukes remains. They're going to focus on the "by 2010" number. Stephen Hadley is going to make a statement at 3pm ET.

UPDATE III: I wonder what newly-minted WMD advisor Paul Wolfowitz has to say about this.


UPDATE IV: The declassified portion of the NIE report is here (.pdf). Here's something:

Iran resumed its declared centrifuge enrichment activities in January 2006, despite the continued halt in the nuclear weapons program. Iran made significant progress in 2007 installing centrifuges at Natanz, but we judge with moderate confidence it still faces significant technical problems operating them [...]

We judge with moderate confidence Iran probably would be technically capable of
producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame.
(INR judges Iran is unlikely to achieve this capability before 2013 because of
foreseeable technical and programmatic problems.) All agencies recognize the
possibility that this capability may not be attained until after 2015.

In other words, the centrifuges are malfunctioning, if they fix them all and nothing else goes wrong they could have enough uranium in two years, but it's unlikely that they would actually have enough for six years. This is important to know when wingers go on the teevee and claim "Iran's going to have a weapon in two years!"