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.
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.
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