by emptywheel
The Bush administration creates a false sense of urgency about a nuclear menace from a Middle Eastern country. Hard-liners talk about that country's connections to terrorists. They portray European diplomatic efforts to defuse tensions as a feckless attempt to appease a rogue nation whose word can never be trusted anyway. Secretary of State Colin Powell makes ominous-sounding warnings about new intelligence, which turns out to be dubious.
If you haven't guessed, this NYT editorial doesn't refer to Iraq. It refers to Iran. And it didn't appear in 2002, in response to some WHIG peddled lies. It appeared a year ago, in response to some apparently questionable intelligence about Iran the Administration was floating.
But like the WHIG-peddled lies, the Iran intelligence is still relevant--in this case, because the Administration is recycling the intelligence that was challenged over a year ago.
Powell Shames Himself, Again
On November 17, 2004, one day after his (reportedly forced) resignation, two days after the IAEA announced Iran had no nuclear bomb program, and not long after Bush declared his narrow victory gave him a mandate, Colin Powell announced that Iran was designing a missile that could deliver a nuclear weapon.
"I have seen some information that would suggest that they have been actively working on delivery systems. . . . You don't have a weapon until you put it in something that can deliver a weapon," Powell told reporters traveling with him to Chile for an Asia-Pacific economic summit. "I'm not talking about uranium or fissile material or the warhead; I'm talking about what one does with a warhead."
[snip]
"I'm talking about information that says they not only have these missiles, but I am aware of information that suggests that they were working hard as to how to put the two together," Powell said, referring to the process of matching warheads to missiles. He spoke to reporters during a refueling stop in Manaus, Brazil.
"There is no doubt in my mind -- and it's fairly straightforward from what we've been saying for years -- that they have been interested in a nuclear weapon that has utility, meaning that it is something they would be able to deliver, not just something that sits there," Powell said.
Powell went on to tie this claim to the Administration response to a Euro 3 effort to forge an agreement on nukes with Iran.
Powell also told reporters that the United States had not decided what action to take following Sunday's agreement. The Bush administration had insisted that Iran's past violations warranted taking the matter to the U.N. Security Council.
Powell said the United States would monitor verification efforts "with necessary and deserved caution because for 20 years the Iranians have been trying to hide things from the international community."
Caveats aside ("aware of information that suggests" reminds me of the "British government has learned" construction from the SOTU), in one of his last acts as Secretary of State, Colin Powell once again lent his credibility to help Bush justify a belligerent stance.
Predictably, Powell's claim was soon echoed by a chorus of exiles.
An Iranian opposition group leveled startling but unconfirmed charges on Wednesday that Iran had bought blueprints for a nuclear bomb and obtained weapons-grade uranium on the black market.
The group also charged that Iran was still secretly enriching uranium at an undisclosed Defense Ministry site in Tehran, despite an agreement with the Europeans two days ago to suspend all enrichment activities.
The claims, made in separate news conferences in Paris and Vienna by a group known as the National Council of Resistance, the political front for the People's Mujahedeen, could not be independently verified, and independent nuclear experts were divided about whether they could be true.
Only this time, the press was more skeptical of Powell's and the exiles' claims. A day later, Dafna Linzer notes the weakness of Powell's claim.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell shared information with reporters Wednesday about Iran's nuclear program that was classified and based on an unvetted, single source who provided information that two U.S. officials said yesterday was highly significant if true but has not yet been verified.
Powell and other senior Cabinet members were briefed last week on the sensitive intelligence. The material was stamped "No Foreign," meaning it was not to be shared with allies, although President Bush decided that portions could be shared last week with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, officials said.
According to one official with access to the material, a "walk-in" source approached U.S intelligence earlier this month with more than 1,000 pages purported to be Iranian drawings and technical documents, including a nuclear warhead design and modifications to enable Iranian ballistic missiles to deliver an atomic strike. The official agreed to discuss the information on the condition of anonymity and only because Powell had alluded to it publicly.
[snip]
The information provided by the source, who was not previously known to U.S. intelligence, does not mention uranium or any other area of Iran's known nuclear program, according to the official with access to the material. It focuses instead on a warhead design and modifications to Iran's long-range Shahab-3 missile and a medium-range missile in its arsenal. The Shahab-3 has a range of 800 miles and is capable of hitting Israel.
The official said the CIA remains unsure about the authenticity of the documents and how they came into the informant's possession. A second official would say only that there are questions about the source of the information.
Officials interviewed by The Washington Post did not know the identity of the source or whether the individual is connected to an Iranian exile group that made fresh accusations about Iran at a news conference Wednesday in Paris.
In a Doug Jehl and William Broad article asking similar questions, they include what seems to be a State Department claim that this information isn't ready for prime time.
After the experience in Iraq, where American intelligence about illicit weapons turned out to be badly overstated, the lesson now being applied in the case of Iran is ''to be appropriately skeptical about intelligence claims, and to really do your homework,'' a State Department official said Friday.
''We're not in a Feb. 5 mode on Iran,'' the official said, referring to the date in 2003 when Mr. Powell presented what later proved to be a flawed case against Iraq to the United Nations Security Council, ''in the sense that we're not ready to submit our information to public scrutiny.''
Intelligence on Iran, as was the case with Iraq before the invasion, is riddled with holes, some current and former government officials acknowledge.
''Prior to the invasion of Iraq, we knew our intelligence on Iraq was inadequate but we did not realize how poor it actually was,'' said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst who is the author of a new book on Iran. ''Today, most intelligence officials believe that our intelligence about Iranian decision making and weapons of mass destruction is even more fragmentary and uncertain than what we believed to be our state of knowledge about Iraq.''
In other words, at least as of last fall, not only was this particular bit of intelligence of questionable value, but so was almost everything the IC was getting on Iran.
The Administration Waits, Then Recycles Powell's Dodgy Claims at a More Opportune Time
The Bush Administration (or at least State Department officials) may not have believed that intelligence was ready for prime time a year ago. But they apparently believe it is ready now. In September we learned BushCo had itself another powerpoint presentation, this one titled "A History of Concealment and Deception" (did they get the same guy who came up with the name for the WHIG product, "A Grave and Gathering Danger" to name this one?):
The PowerPoint briefing, titled "A History of Concealment and Deception," has been presented to diplomats from more than a dozen countries.
[snip]
Several diplomats said the slide show reminded them of the flawed presentation on Iraq's weapons programs made by then-secretary of state Colin L. Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003.
BushCo may think this is ready for prime time. But some people who have seen the presentation are not so sure.
Several diplomats said the presentation, intended to win allies for increasing pressure on the Iranian government, dismisses ambiguities in the evidence about Iran's intentions and omits alternative explanations under debate among intelligence analysts.
The presenters argue that the evidence leads solidly to a conclusion that Iran's nuclear program is aimed at producing weapons, according to diplomats who have attended the briefings and U.S. officials who helped to assemble the slide show. But even U.S. intelligence estimates acknowledge that other possibilities are plausible, though unverified.
The problem, acknowledged one U.S. official, is that the evidence is not definitive. Briefers "say you can't draw any other conclusion, and of course you can draw other conclusions," said the official, who would discuss the closed-door sessions only on condition of anonymity
Sounds familiar, huh? Omitting alternative explanations ... again? But the most important line from this passage is this: "But even U.S. intelligence estimates acknowledge that other possibilities are plausible, though unverified." Quick, someone tell Condi that somewhere deep in the bowels of the agency there are people who doubt this intelligence, because she will deny it later, mark my words.
We're in the middle of arguments about the intelligence used to get us into the Iraq War, where Republicans try to prove that BushCo didn't withhold information and Democrats point out that the Administration suppressed the doubts within the IC. But why are we having the argument about the last war, when they're doing it again??? The Bush Administration is withholding information in the present--regardless of what it did in the past.
One more thing. This slide show? You'd think it'd reflect the consensus opinion of the IC, right? Well, no. Rather, it looks a lot more like the product of the reincarnation of OSP or WHIG than something respectable intelligence professionals (if there are any left who haven't been hounded out by BushCo) would buy off on:
The presentation has not been vetted through standard U.S. intelligence channels because it does not include secret material. One U.S. official involved in the briefing said the intelligence community had nothing to do with the presentation and "probably would have disavowed some of it because it draws conclusions that aren't strictly supported by the facts."
The presentation, conducted in a conference room at the U.S. mission in Vienna, includes a pictorial comparison of Iranian facilities and missiles with photos of similar-looking items in North Korea and Pakistan, according to a copy of the slides handed out to diplomats. Pakistan largely supplied Iran with its nuclear infrastructure but, as a key U.S. ally, it is identified in the presentation only as "another country."
Two months ago, the Bush Administration presented an explicitly politicized presentation to diplomats from other countries in an attempt to drum up support for a hardline against Iran.
The Bush Administration Goes High Tech
In addition to their scary slide show, the Bush Administration has apparently gone high tech.
In mid-July, senior American intelligence officials called the leaders of the international atomic inspection agency to the top of a skyscraper overlooking the Danube in Vienna and unveiled the contents of what they said was a stolen Iranian laptop computer.
The Americans flashed on a screen and spread over a conference table selections from more than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments, saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead, according to a half-dozen European and American participants in the meeting.
The documents, the Americans acknowledged from the start, do not prove that Iran has an atomic bomb. They presented them as the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran's insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East.
This laptop apparently hasn't proven any more convincing than the other claims the Administration has presented.
Nonetheless, doubts about the intelligence persist among some foreign analysts.
[snip]
After more than a year of analysis, questions remain about the trove's authenticity. "Even with the best intelligence, you always ask yourself, 'Was this prepared for my eyes?' " one American official said. Several intelligence experts said that a sophisticated Western spy agency could, in theory, have produced the contents of the laptop. But American officials insisted there was no evidence of such fraud.
Varying Assessments of the Same Intelligence
Now, before I get too far into this, let me make an assertion. In spite of the fact the Administration says they got this computer in mid-2004 (that is, earlier than the documents Powell referenced, which are said to have been supplied by a walk-in source in early November 2004), this intelligence appears to be the same intelligence Powell referenced in his last act of Bush Administration shillery. This most recent Broad article implies as much:
Until now, there has been only one official reference to them: a year ago in a conversation with reporters, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, briefly referred to new, missile-related intelligence on Iran. Since then, reports in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and other publications have revealed some details of the intelligence, including that the United States has obtained thousands of pages of Iranian documents on warhead development.
Further, the information is clearly the same--allegations that Iran has made significant progress on developing a missile cone capable of delivering a nuclear weapon. But look at the vastly different treatment of this intelligence now--after we've all forgotten about the work Dafna Linzer did debunking this last Novamber.
Last fall, this source was considered sketchy, a walk-in whose ties to unreliable exiles could neither be affirmed nor denied. Now, that source is considered quite good.
Within the United States government, "the nature and the history of the source has left everyone pretty confident that this is the real thing," said a former senior American intelligence official who was briefed on the laptop.
Except, as they did with their Iraq defectors and some Iraqi scientists who supported their claims, the Bush Administration has made it impossible to verify this source.
American officials, citing the need to protect their source, have largely refused to provide details of the origins of the laptop computer beyond saying that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a longtime contact in Iran.
[snip]
American officials have said little in their briefings about the origins of the laptop, other than that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a source in Iran who they said had received it from a second person, now believed to be dead.
Pretty convenient, huh? They won't reveal who brokered this information to us, and they believe--but don't seem able to verify one way another--that the original source, who could verify this information and provide back-up data, is dead.
I find the reference to a longtime contact especially troubling. As the Jehl article explains, none of our sources in Iran are particularly strong:
In recent years, some of the most important information about Iran's nuclear program has been brought to the attention of American intelligence by a dissident group, the People's Mujahedeen of Iran. That group, which issued new claims this week, has sometimes shown an inconsistent record as a source of intelligence information.
Former intelligence officials said that in recent months American intelligence officers have gained a new window on Iran as a result of their operations in neighboring Iraq. But it was not clear whether the large flow of new information being gathered on Iran from Iraq was proving reliable, the former officials said.
Add in the one other long-term source the Neocons favor--Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian version of Chalabi, who fooled us badly during Iran-Contra and doesn't seem to be any more reliable now. Now, Administration officials insist that this supposed nameless and maybe dead source is not a member of an exile group.
Without revealing the source of the computer, American intelligence officials insisted that it had not come from any Iranian resistance groups, whose claims about Iran's nuclear program have had a mixed record for accuracy.
Well, they could be telling the truth for a change. Their source could be Ghorbanifar or someone like him. Or they could be lying, as they did about some of Chalabi's defectors before the Iraq war. In any case, they're using the same excuses to protect their claims as they did before, which doesn't make me believe them.
Finally, if this is the same guy associated with Powell's statements, they obscure the fact this was a walk-in.
And here's their idea of really compelling proof of authenticity.
Officials said they found the warhead documents, written in Persian, convincing because of their consistency and technical accuracy and because they showed a progression of developmental work from 2001 to early 2004.
You know what? The Niger forgeries were written in French. That didn't make them reliable. I'd be a lot more comfortable if the compelling proof was a direct correlation with what we know of the Iranian nuclear program rather than a linguistic one and a technical accuracy.
Nose Cones Are the New Aluminum Tube
I find the focus on missile cone technology particularly intriguing. We know that BushCo focused on uranium acquisition when making its case about Iraq because it was incendiary, and because (in the absence of an Iraqi nuclear energy program) it provided proof that Iraq's intentions were military. No matter that Iraq already had 500 tons of yellowcake in Iraq. Uranium acquisition made good press.
The missile cone is similar. Iran says its nuclear program is intended strictly for civilian purposes. But the missile cone intelligence--if it were verifiable--would clearly prove Iran was interested in military, not civilian, applications for nuclear technology. No wonder the missile cone is such a central part of their new dog and pony show. No wonder they got Powell to endorse this before they laughed him out of their little cabal.
Plus, it seems the nose cone is important because it is correlates with known events--Iran recently tested missiles a new nose cone design. This makes up for the fact that we have no real sources within Iran, because it makes the known information appear a lot more ominous. From Jehl:
In August [2004], a new surprise emerged as Iran test-fired a rocket that bore a suspicious-looking nose cone.
The rocket was an updated version of their Shahab-3 missile, and the test ignited a quiet debate among experts over whether its advanced nose cone was designed to carry a nuclear warhead. For two decades, the Iranians have been developing generations of long-range rockets with the aid of North Korea, and the Shahab, which means shooting star in Persian, stands at the cutting edge.
After last summer's test-firing, Charles P. Vick, an expert on the Iranian program at GlobalSecurity.org, a research group based in Alexandria, Va., said, ''What I've seen fly is a prototype for a nuclear warhead.''
From the recent Broad article.
Tehran test-fired an upgraded version of the Shahab - shooting star in Persian - in a flight that featured the first appearance of an advanced nose cone made up of three distinct shapes. Missile experts noted that such triconic nose cones have great range, accuracy and stability in flight, but less payload space. Therefore, experts say, they have typically been used to carry nuclear arms.
But other experts point to the smaller space of Iran's nose cones as a limiting factor for nuclear payload.
But other experts said the nose cone might be part of Iran's preparations for launching a satellite into orbit, which Tehran has said it plans to do in April. It was too thin, one said, to hold a relatively crude nuclear weapon.
''These guys need all the space they can get'' atop a missile, said a European expert who closely follows the Iranian program.
Another scientist complains about the method the Bush Administration used in its power point presentation, comparing Iranian missiles to North Korean ones.
Corey Hinderstein, a nuclear analyst with the Institute for Science and International Security, said the presence of a weapons program could not be established through such comparisons. She noted that North Korea's missile wasn't designed for nuclear weapons, so comparing it to an Iranian missile that also wasn't designed to carry a nuclear payload "doesn't make sense. The idea that it was somehow capable of a nuclear payload is okay. But designed for a nuclear payload, I don't know how you get that."
The nose cones seem to be another aluminum tube, where some scientists insist the design points to nuclear application, while others discount those claim. I find the timing particularly interesting. The first test of these nose cones was in August 2004. Last year, Powell said his intelligence about nose cones had come in in November. But now, they're claiming it came in during the summer, suggesting the intelligence came in before the missile test. Was this intelligence a response to the missile test?
New Operative Strategy
I think this intelligence is bogus. But whether or not it's bogus, it's clear the Bush Administration is following a different approach to gain support for their whatever they plan to do against Iran. They claim they're limiting the circulation of these briefings because they still want to verify the information.
But the Bush administration, seeming to understand the depth of its credibility problem, is only talking about the laptop computer and its contents in secret briefings, more than a dozen so far. And even while President Bush is defending his pronouncements before the war about Iraq's unconventional weapons, he has never publicly referred to the Iran documents.
But it seems more like they're limiting the briefings so they can show the dodgier claims to people they trust, people predisposed to believe what they say.
In interviews in recent weeks, analysts and officials from six countries in Europe and Asia revealed a more extensive picture of the intelligence briefings.
(I assume this is the Euro 3, Russia, China, and one other country, probably India.) Then, they're showing a shorter version to an awfully weird group of potential allies.
The United States rarely shares raw intelligence outside a small circle of close allies. But it decided to disseminate a shortened version of the secret warhead briefing. Mr. Joseph and his colleagues presented it to the president of Ghana and to officials from Argentina, Sri Lanka, Tunisia and Nigeria, among other nations.
Ghana? Argentina? Sri Lanka? Nigeria? These are going to make up the next Coalition of the Willing? I hope BushCo remembers what happened in the Falkland War, a war that took place when Argentina spent a much larger proportion of their budget on the military. And Nigeria? If they gave us troops unrest in the country would stop the flow of Nigerian oil within weeks. I just hope we get the Tamil Tigers from Sri Lanka--they know how to fight. Nevertheless, the Administration seems to think this odd collection of countries needs to be convinced--and can be convinced.
And finally, there's the group that the Bush Administration shows the unfortunately named White Paper (given how dodgy the British White Paper proved to be), which is apparently the power point presentation in the recent Dafna Linzer article.
But the administration felt uncomfortable sharing any classified intelligence with another ring of countries. For them, it developed the equivalent of the white paper on Iraq that Britain and the United States published before the Iraq war. The 43-page unclassified briefing includes no reference to the warhead documents, but uses commercial satellite photos and economic analysis to argue that Iran has no need for nuclear power and has long hidden its true ambitions.
Note what they're not doing. They seem to be conducting these briefings in unilateral arrangements, bypassing the UN and working both inside and outside of the IAEA. And they're giving multiple versions of their story, rather than making one presentation--to be debunked or accepted--at the UN. In any case, they're using a completely different strategy than the one that failed at the UN with the Iraq War.
One more thing. It may be that John Bolton's failed attempt to hound el-Baradei out as head of the IAEA may be the critical failure in this strategy.
Dr. ElBaradei said his agency was bound to "follow due process, which means I need to establish the veracity, consistency and authenticity of any intelligence, and share it with the country of concern." In this case, he added, "That has not happened."
But maybe that's not the case. Maybe failure with el-Baradei is precisely the plan.
Some European diplomats are concerned that confronting the Iranians with strong evidence of the warhead studies could cause Tehran to abandon negotiations with the West, expel international inspectors and move forward with its plans, whatever they may be.
At the very least, it'd be a good way to scuttle ongoing attempts to reach a compromise agreement with Iran.
I have no doubt that the Iranians have an interest in developing nuclear weapons. Although I tend to believe the more credible intelligence that puts their nuclear capabilities further out, ten years out, intelligence which supports engagement rather than belligerence. But I admit we don't know what kind of weapons Iran can wield in the near future.
One thing we do know. The Bush Administration continues to conduct full-scale Information Warfare against Iran. And that Information Warfare does more to discredit attempts to achieve peace and stability than an honest debate about Iran's capabilities would.
Two things that stick out for me.
The scary slide show? They're using open source claims so they can avoid all vetting. Hmm. That's convenient. Make it up!
Also, the unilateralism of their approach. I'm guessing they're going to pit people off of one another, as they tried to do in the UNSC debate (but failed to do, because it was so public). That's good though. Because John Bolton? Not so good at real multilateral diplomacy.
Posted by: emptywheel | November 14, 2005 at 16:42
At least Judy isn't covering the "Iranian nuclear program," despite Libby's encouragement in his September letter...
Posted by: QuickSilver | November 14, 2005 at 18:18
Excellent and important analysis. Please crosspost to Daily Kos. Highly recommended!
Posted by: QuickSilver | November 14, 2005 at 19:48
Superwelldone, here's to hoping this post travels far and wide across the Internet. The entire Neocon strategy is backfiring, as even Faux News is sure soon to realize. They can keep on crying Wolfowitz, but the world won't much listen anymore.
BushCo bulled it out to win in 2004, holding the line on the lies all the way, supposing the lesson learned was they could just keep on doing more of the same. But nowadays they're learning otherwise. It's hard to see how they can bull it out much longer. The levies are breaking. Thanks to things like Fitz and the Uncontrollable Internet and Reality and so forth.
Plus that ever-curious strain of Neocon sloppiness... Really, that Yellowcake business was awfully sloppy. Amateurish, I daresay. And by the way, what ever did happen to Judy's Floating Knesset and Her Other Scintillating African Uranium Forgeries?
The question is -- Why do the Neocons still keep at it, anyhow? Why still Iran, why still Syria, why still the whole rest of those Middle Eastern dominoes? Against every conceivable form of historical sanity? Have they no shame?
Their unreasoning perseverance has made more sense, to me, after taking a look at the 1998 Charles Krauthammer article linked below, which is part of the new Weekly Standard 10-Year Anniversary volume...... Aha, okay, that's it, there it is.
It's important not to underestimate the extent of neocon paranoia. They went for broke, they had everything in place, everyone in just the right places, and they came so very darned close to the pink carnation. But barring some sudden terrorist catastrophe or such, it seems they'll be coming up short. Luckily for America. Sure was a heck of a run, though, wasn't it?
If they'da just been honest, all along, I might still be on their side.
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:WeVR0ORRXAEJ:www.freeman.org/m_online/aug98/krauthmr.htm+%22Charles+Krauthammer%22+%22At+Last,+Zion%22&hl=en
Posted by: Smokestack | November 15, 2005 at 02:57
There's an interesting article on Iran's nuclear program in the November issue of Le Monde diplomatique, entitled "Iran needs nuclear power, not weapons" which provides some interesting background and theories.
The Google-cached version does not require a subscription.
Posted by: Red Jenny | November 16, 2005 at 13:05
that sucks
Posted by: Tiffany | March 24, 2007 at 12:06