The Trib's Take On The NIE

We're such big, huge, enthusiastic fans of the Trib here at 2PJ (it sez so here) that it pains me to offer some critical analysis of the editorial board's latest. It's on the recently declassified NIE.

The argument proffered by the loyalists at the Scaife-owned little-paper-that-could boils down (roughly) to this: the Intelligence Community said one thing two years ago and is now saying something else. So which is right? Which report do we believe? Oh, the confusion of it all!

Take a look:

The American intelligence apparat, in a major reversal, now says Iran halted a secret nuclear-weapons program in 2003.

Two years ago, the assessment suggested Iranian nuclear weapons were imminent; it fueled saber rattling from a Bush administration already at war in Iraq, based on faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

What could have possibly changed things so completely? One explanation can be found here at the Washington Post. First off, there's a new methology:

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.

And with this new methology, they took a new look:

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.

And that lead to a new conclusion. Simple, really.

But the Trib has a few more cards to play.

Complicating the matter, however, is that the reassessment may rely on information from a senior Iranian official who defected. Is it a ploy? Much of the U.S.'s erroneous Iraq assumptions were based on the claims of a single and poorly vetted snitch.

So here's the other shoe dropping. Since much of Bush's run up to war was based on a "single and poorly vetted snitch," (that would be Curveball), and this turnaround "may rely" on a defector, why should we believe it?

From the Guardian:

The U-turn by US spy agencies over Iran, the biggest since the Iraq debacle five years ago, is the result of "physical" intelligence, likely to be a defector, according to various diplomatic and security sources in Washington today.

One of the main figures in the frame is General Ali-Reza Asgari, a former deputy defence minister and Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander.

Asgari apparently disappeared in Turkey over the last 12 months, having either defected or been kidnapped, and may be in US hands.

However:

Work on the latest NIE report on Iran has been under way for more than a year. Senior intelligence officials, quoted in the New York Times, cautioned against concluding that the turnaround had been the result of a single defector and pointed to an analysis of video footage of a tour by foreign journalists of Iran's nuclear facility at Natanz in 2005.

And notice the chronology. The Iran Operations Division was established in the months after the Summer of 2005 (let's say the fall of 2005). The defector (if he indeed defected and if he is indeed the source) has only been available for the past year or so.

To its credit, the Trib's editorial board does add this:

But, all this said, the new intelligence conclusions suggest that U.S.-led international pressure may have worked in stunting Iran's nuclear ambitions. Such pressure -- and a dedicated policy of containment -- actually was working against Iraq prior to the U.S.-led invasion.

So, what to believe?

It's simple. Just do a little research and see where the information takes you. I did that. Why couldn't the Trib's editorial board?