The Asia Times is one of the best newspapers on the web today, but one that I think does not get enough recognition out there. Here is a very interesting column by David Isenberg on how the administration thinks the press should be following its lead on finding Iran a strategic threat to the United States, one that justifies a war against it.
Asia Times Online :: Middle East News – Another US intelligence test
Middle East
Aug 29, 2006
Another US intelligence test
By David Isenberg
One might think that after all the post-mortems on politicization of intelligence leading up to the US invasion of Iraq, members of the US Congress might have learned a few things about not rushing in where angels fear to tread. But you would be wrong, if a recent report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is any example.
Last Wednesday, Pete Hoekstra, a Republican congressman
from Michigan and chairman of the committee, released a report, “Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States”. [1] The not very subtle implication was that those who don’t agree Iran is a threat are fools.
This is exactly the same sort of tactic that the White House was using in 2002 and 2003 when Vice President Dick Cheney was talking about mushroom clouds rising into the sky due to an Iraqi nuclear weapon.


The New York Times, which pretty much accepted the White House spin on Iraq, thanks to its former reporter Judy Miller, recognized the new report for what it is. It editorialized this way:
The last thing this country needs as it heads into this election season is another attempt to push the intelligence agencies to hype their conclusions about the threat from a Middle Eastern state. That’s what happened in 2002, when the administration engineered a deeply flawed document on Iraq that reshaped intelligence to fit President [George W] Bush’s policy. And history appeared to be repeating itself … when the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, released a garishly illustrated and luridly written document that is ostensibly dedicated to “helping the American people understand” that Iran’s fundamentalist regime and its nuclear ambitions pose a strategic threat to the United States.
Just to make sure nobody missed the point, Hoekstra’s press release said, “As an unclassified assessment, this report is aimed at providing information for the American people to use in understanding the very real threat our nation faces from Iran.”
But Hoekstra is hardly a disinterested party in this. Earlier this year, citing an army report that units had dug up corroded canisters of chemical agent dating back decades, he and Senator Rick Santorum insisted that weapons of mass destruction had indeed been found in Iraq – a claim that not even Cheney or Defense Secretary Rumsfeld supported.
What a difference the passage of time makes. In March 2005, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction released its final report. Although it did study Iran, the results were deemed too sensitive to reveal in the unclassified report that was released.
But it did say, “But we also reviewed the state of the intelligence community’s knowledge about the unconventional weapons programs of several countries that pose current proliferation threats, including Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. We cannot discuss many of our findings from these studies in our unclassified report, but we can say here that we found that we have only limited access to critical information about several of these high-priority intelligence targets.”
It is important to note from the very outset that in terms of making a case against Iran in regard to its unconventional-weapons capabilities, the latest report is far from definitive. The cover letter notes that the assessment is based on “open-source materials”. Open-source material is a valuable source, but it is hardly definitive, as exemplified by the 88 footnotes referring to news reports and already-public government reports.
It also noted that the committee staff “as a courtesy” invited the US intelligence community to provide input on the report. But its authors did not interview intelligence officials. In other words, the report was largely insulated from any input or analysis by intelligence community professionals during its actual drafting.
That may well have been deliberate, as the intelligence community is uncertain about what it actually knows about Iran. When the committee report cites analysis done by the director of National Intelligence or the State Department, one sees language such as, “Iran likely has an offensive-chemical-weapons research-and-development capability,” or “Iran probably has an offensive-biological-weapons program.” This is hardly the “slam dunk” evidence that those wishing to attack Iran want to read.
Ray McGovern, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst for nearly 30 years and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, noted that the committee report was primarily drafted by Frederick Fleitz, who did his apprenticeship on politicization under US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, when the latter was under secretary of state, and became his principal aide and chief enforcer while on loan from the CIA.
Bolton had been highly influential in the crafting of a tough policy that rejected talks with Tehran. Fleitz was the same official who “explained” to State Department intelligence analyst Christian Westermann that it was “a political judgment as to how to interpret” data on Cuba’s biological-weapons program (which existed only in Bolton’s mind) and that the intelligence community “should do as we asked”.
It is ironic that as the debate over Iran’s capabilities and intentions proceeds, the intelligence community is being criticized for not providing sufficient evidence of Iran’s “threat” to the US. This is being spun as a case of the intelligence analysts being too conservative in their work for fear of making the same alleged “mistakes” – this is the new post-Iraq party line. The line is that it was the intelligence analysts who made mistakes, as opposed to policymakers in the White House who pressured intelligence analysts to come up with conclusions to support their already established policies – that they supposedly made in the case of Iraq.
Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said, “Analysts were burned pretty badly during the run-up to the war in Iraq. I’m not surprised that some in the intelligence community are a bit gun-shy about appearing to be warmongering.”
Gary Sick, a former National Security Council staff member in the Jimmy Carter administration and director of the Gulf/2000 project at Columbia University, circulated a memo last week noting problems with the accuracy of the committee report. He wrote:
If you are going to take on the entire US intelligence community, it is a very good idea to at least get your basic facts straight. On a very quick reading, I found a statement on page 9 claiming that the 164 centrifuges at the Iranian Natanz site are “currently enriching uranium to weapons grade”. There is no evidence whatsoever that this is true – and a lot of evidence that the tiny bit of enriched uranium produced at this site was reactor-grade (c 2.5% vs weapons grade c 95%). It may be true that Fleitz, and perhaps many in the neo-con community, suspect that weapons-grade enrichment is either covertly under way or is planned, but their suspicions should not be allowed to substitute for facts.
Throughout the report, there is careful documentation of any and all criticism that the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspectors have produced or any questions that they may have raised about Iran’s performance. However, there is no mention at all of any of the IAEA conclusions that they find no evidence of weapons production or activity. Some people will recall that the IAEA inspectors, in their caution, were closer to the truth about Iraqi WMD [weapons of mass destruction] than, say, the Vice President’s Office.
The summary of the study claims that Iran has “the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East” and it focuses attention on the 1,300-kilometer [range] Iranian Shahab-3 missile and its possible future development for carrying a nuclear warhead, including a handy map of exaggerated ranges for the Shahab-3 and (as yet non-existent) Shahab-4 demonstrating that everything from Monaco to Moscow to Mumbai is vulnerable to Iranian strikes.
A very quick check of the study’s own sources revealed that Iran has “some” Shahab-3 missiles, but probably not more than a handful. By contrast, Israel has 50 ballistic missiles with range greater than the Shahab and configured for nuclear warheads that are stored “nearby”. Saudi Arabia, we need to recall, has 40-60 long-range missiles, each with a range of 2,650km and all capable of carrying a 2,500-kilogram warhead, clearly the largest inventory of its kind in the Middle East.
The author of this report did not have the time or inclination to talk to any of the intelligence organizations that he was indicting. If he had, he might at least have caught some of the embarrassing bloopers in the text. Yet the report was rushed to public release in order to coincide with Iran’s reply to the Europeans (for maximum publicity impact), without even waiting for it to be reviewed by the full committee.
The irony, therefore, is stunning when Representative Peter Hoekstra, who heads the Senate Committee, explained the rush by commenting that “we want to avoid another ‘slam dunk'”. The famous “slam dunk” judgment on Iraq’s WMD was, of course, the result of selective reading of available intelligence (which some call cherry-picking), plus a willingness by some to subordinate the (often prosaic) facts to (sensational) ideological conviction.
That is exactly what has happened in this report. It is a sloppy attempt to lay the ground for another slam-dunk judgment and a potential rush to war. It deserves to be recognized for what it is.
Note
1. Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States
David Isenberg is a senior research analyst at the British American Security Information Council, a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, and an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information, Washington. These views are his own.