Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in Iran NIE
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Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in Iran NIE
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by Steven Robinson
IPS via antiwar- Nov 9, 2007
http://www.antiwar.com/porter/?articleid=11879
Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in Iran NIE
by Gareth Porter
A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more
than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove
dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear program, and thus make the
document more supportive of US Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily
aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process
provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency
officers.
But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by
Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those
dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently
decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its
key findings public.
A former CIA intelligence officer who has asked not to be identified
told IPS that an official involved in the NIE process says the Iran
estimate was ready to be published a year ago but has been delayed
because the director of national intelligence wanted a draft reflecting
a consensus on key conclusions - particularly on Iran's nuclear program.
The NIE coordinates the judgments of 16 intelligence agencies on a
specific country or issue.
There is a split in the intelligence community on how much of a threat
the Iranian nuclear program poses, according to the intelligence
official's account. Some analysts who are less independent are willing
to give the benefit of the doubt to the alarmist view coming from
Cheney's office, but others have rejected that view.
The draft NIE first completed a year ago, which had included the
dissenting views, was not acceptable to the White House, according to
the former intelligence officer. "They refused to come out with a
version that had dissenting views in it," he says.
As recently as early October, the official involved in the process was
said to be unclear about whether an NIE would be circulated and, if so,
what it would say.
Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi provided a similar account, based on
his own sources in the intelligence community. He told IPS that
intelligence analysts have had to review and rewrite their findings
three times, because of pressure from the White House.
"The White House wants a document that it can use as evidence for its
Iran policy," says Giraldi. Despite pressures on them to change their
dissenting conclusions, however, Giraldi says some analysts have
refused to go along with conclusions that they believe are not
supported by the evidence.
In February 2007, Giraldi wrote in The American Conservative that the
NIE on Iran had already been completed, but that Cheney's office had
objected to its findings on both the Iranian nuclear program. and
Iran's role in Iraq. The draft NIE did not conclude that there was
confirming evidence that Iran was arming the Shi'ite insurgents in
Iraq, according to Giraldi.
Giraldi said the White House had decided to postpone any decision on the
internal release of the NIE until after the November 2006 elections.
Cheney's desire for a "clean" NIE that could be used to support his
aggressive policy toward Iran was apparently a major factor in the
replacement of John Negroponte as director of national intelligence in
early 2007.
Negroponte had angered the neoconservatives in the administration by
telling the press in April 2006 that the intelligence community
believed that it would still be "a number of years off" before Iran
would be "likely to have enough fissile material to assemble into or to
put into a nuclear weapon, perhaps into the next decade."
Neoconservatives immediately attacked Negroponte for the statement,
which merely reflected the existing NIE on Iran issued in Spring 2005.
Robert G. Joseph, the undersecretary of state for arms control and an
ally of Cheney, contradicted Negroponte the following day. He suggested
that Iran's nuclear program. was nearing the "point of no return" - an
Israeli concept referring to the mastery of industrial-scale uranium
enrichment.
Frank J. Gaffney, a protigi of neoconservative heavyweight Richard
Perle, complained that Negroponte was "absurdly declaring the Iranian
regime to be years away from having nuclear weapons."
On Jan. 5, 2007, Pres. George W. Bush announced the nomination of
retired Vice Admiral John Michael "Mike" McConnell to be director of
national intelligence. McConnell was approached by Cheney himself about
accepting the position, according to Newsweek.
McConnell was far more amenable to White House influence than his
predecessor. On Feb. 27, one week after his confirmation, he told the
Senate Armed Services Committee he was "comfortable saying it's
probable" that the alleged export of explosively formed penetrators to
Shi'ite insurgents in Iraq was linked to the highest leadership in Iran.
Cheney had been making that charge, but Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, as well as Negroponte,
had opposed it.
A public event last spring indicated that White House had ordered a
reconsideration of the draft NIE's conclusion on how many years it would
take Iran to produce a nuclear weapon. The previous Iran estimate
completed in spring 2005 had estimated it as 2010 to 2015.
Two weeks after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced in
mid-April that Iran would begin producing nuclear fuel on an industrial
scale, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Thomas
Fingar, said in an interview with National Public Radio that the
completion of the NIE on Iran had been delayed while the intelligence
community determined whether its judgment on the time frame within
which Iran might produce a nuclear weapon needed to be amended.
Fingar said the estimate "might change," citing "new reporting" from the
International Atomic Energy Agency as well as "some other new
information we have." And then he added, "We are serious about
reexamining old evidence."
That extraordinary revelation about the NIE process, which was obviously
ordered by McConnell, was an unsubtle signal to the intelligence
community that the White House was determined to obtain a more alarmist
conclusion on the Iranian nuclear program.
A decision announced in late October indicated, however, that Cheney
did not get the consensus findings on the nuclear program and Iran's
role in Iraq that he had wanted. On Oct. 27, David Shedd, a deputy to
McConnell, told a congressional briefing that McConnell had issued a
directive making it more difficult to declassify the key judgments of
national intelligence estimates.
That reversed a Bush administration practice of releasing summaries of
"key judgments" in NIEs that began when the White House made public the
key judgments from the controversial 2002 NIE on Iraq's alleged weapons
of mass destruction program in July 2003.
The decision to withhold key judgments on Iran from the public was
apparently part of a White House strategy for reducing the potential
damage of publishing the estimate with the inclusion of dissenting
views.
As of early October, officials involved in the NIE were "throwing their
hands up in frustration" over the refusal of the administration to
allow the estimate to be released, according to the former intelligence
officer. But the Iran NIE is now expected to be circulated within the
administration in late November, says Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst
and founder of the antiwar group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity.
The release of the Iran NIE would certainly intensify the bureaucratic
political struggle over Iran policy. If the NIE includes both dissenting
views on key issues, a campaign of selective leaking to news media of
language from the NIE that supports Cheney's line on Iran will soon
follow, as well as leaks of the dissenting views by his opponents.
Both sides may be anticipating another effort by Cheney to win Bush's
approval of a significant escalation of military pressure on Iran in
early 2008.
*
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