Jack Kelly Sunday

Jack Kelly...tackles the...NIE.

In today's P-G.

And, as usual, he spins and misdirects. He also completely misses the point.

But before we try to deconstruct J-Kel yet again, let's just take a look at how the NIE describes its own construction (if only to head off the inevitable righwing talking point that it was written by 3 disgruntled former State Department officials). Here it is, page 3 of the estimate:

National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) are the Intelligence Community’s (IC) most authoritative written judgments on national security issues and designed to help US civilian and military leaders develop policies to protect US national security interests. NIEs usually provide information on the current state of play but are primarily “estimative”—that is, they make judgments about the likely course of future events and identify the implications for US policy.

The NIEs are typically requested by senior civilian and military policymakers, Congressional leaders and at times are initiated by the National Intelligence Council (NIC). Before a NIE is drafted, the relevant NIO is responsible for producing a concept paper or terms of reference (TOR) and circulates it throughout the Intelligence Community for comment. The TOR defines the key estimative questions, determines drafting responsibilities, and sets the drafting and publication schedule. One or more IC analysts are usually assigned to produce the initial text. The NIC then meets to critique the draft before it is circulated to the broader IC. Representatives from the relevant IC agencies meet to hone and coordinate line-by-line the full text of the NIE. Working with their Agencies, reps also assign the level of confidence they have in each key judgment. IC reps discuss the quality of sources with collectors, and the National Clandestine Service vets the sources used to ensure the draft does not include any that have been recalled or otherwise seriously questioned.

All NIEs are reviewed by National Intelligence Board, which is chaired by the DNI and is composed of the heads of relevant IC agencies. Once approved by the NIB, NIEs are briefed to the President and senior policymakers. The whole process of producing NIEs normally takes at least several months.

Ok now that that's done, let's get down to business. Here's how Commando Kelly begins:

Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and probably won't be able to build a bomb before 2015 if it does restart it, a new National Intelligence Estimate has concluded. That's very good news ... if it's true.

But that's a big if. The NIE is a SWAG (Scientific Wild-Assed Guess), not a statement of proven fact. It's a SWAG from an intelligence community whose predictive record about the Middle East has been poor. It's a SWAG that's challenged by Israeli intelligence, whose predictive history is much better. And it's a SWAG that is diametrically opposed to the last SWAG the intelligence community issued on Iran's nuclear program.

Not that big, if you read how the thing was put together. Jack is relying on the rhetorical device that goes something like this: they were wrong before so why should we believe them now? Turns out that the answer to that has been written into the current NIE.

The NIC has undertaken a number of steps to improve the NIE process under the DNI. These steps are in accordance with the goals and recommendations set out in the SSCI and WMD Commission reports and the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Prevention of Terrorism Act. Most notably, over the last year and a half, the IC has:

• Created new procedures to integrate formal reviews of source reporting and technical judgments. The Directors of the National Clandestine Service, NSA, NGA, and DIA and the Assistant Secretary/INR are now required to submit formal assessments that highlight the strengths, weaknesses, and overall credibility of their sources used in developing the critical judgments of the NIE.

• Applied more rigorous standards. A textbox is incorporated into all NIEs that explains what we mean by such terms as “we judge” and that clarifies the difference between judgments of likelihood and confidence levels. We have made a concerted effort to not only highlight differences among agencies but to explain the reasons for such differences and to prominently display them in the Key Judgments.

We've written on this before, but it might be a good idea to go over this again. How (or at least why) did they change their minds on this?

Here's something (again) from the Washington Post:

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.

So here we have the President asking why it was so hard to get good evidence on the Iranian nuclear program and that spurred on the Intelligence community to take a closer look at the data at hand. When they looked harder, they reassessed what they saw. The result was the latest NIE. And DNI McConnell had a different methodology in place as well. Again, from the Washington Post:

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.

Then there's this from the New York Times:

American intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program, senior intelligence and government officials said on Wednesday.

So. Different data, different methology, why shouldn't there be a different conclusion? Jack, then (kinda) pushes the "disinformation" button only to (kinda) slap it away a paragraph later.

But what if the notes were disinformation planted to mislead us? It was uncorroborated statements which proved to be false from an Iraqi defector (Curveball) which were chiefly responsible for the intelligence community's apparently erroneous conclusions about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

The notes and deliberations were corroborated by other intelligence, including intercepted telephone conversations among Iranian officials, sources told The New York Times.

Ah, Curveball. The gift that keeps on giving. Too bad that Curveball (aka Rafid Ahmed Alwan) wasn't a direct intelligence source for the US. He was controlled by the Germans who did not permit US Intelligence any access to him. Before dubya's war, the head of German Intelligence even tried to warn off US Intelligence about him. Calling him "crazy" and a "waste of time." But this administration needed a reason to go to war and Curveball gave it to them. He was a part of the Administration's lies leading up to the war.

But back to whether the NIE was based on another "Curveball." This is how the New York Times described it:

But they said that the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies had organized a “red team” to determine if the new information might have been part of an elaborate disinformation campaign mounted by Iran to derail the effort to impose sanctions against it.

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.

The officials said they were confident that the notes confirmed the existence, up to 2003, of a weapons programs that American officials first learned about from a laptop computer, belonging to an Iranian engineer, that came into the hands of the C.I.A. in 2004.

No wonder Jack boiled down that meeting (with its "vivid exchange") to one bland sentence. It shows that Dick Cheney knew about the NIE by the third week of November.

Which leads me to the point that Jack Kelly, former National Security Correspondent to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette insisted on missing in his entire column.

The story is not only about the NIE, but about when the highest levels of the Administration knew about it. They've known for months what it said and yet continued to warn (as they did on October 17) about Iran, nuclear weapons, and World War III. As Scott Horton wrote about the timing of the release of the NIE and whether week-old intelligence was at the heart of it at Harpers:

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.”

That, Jack, was the point of all this. Another lie from this Administration that would lead to more needless death and destruction. This time, though, they got caught before anyone got hurt.