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what?
from what I've seen the msm is trying to mask his lies. a really pathetic attempt, too.
wow, how embarrassing it must be to be him.
Yep you have on the crap put out by the MSM and
dimms.
what?
from what I've seen the msm is trying to mask his lies. a really pathetic attempt, too.
wow, how embarrassing it must be to be him.
NIE: An Abrupt About-Face
As many recognize, the latest NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program directly contradicts what the U.S. Intelligence Community was saying just two years previously. And it appears that this about-face was very recent. How recent?
Consider that on July 11, 2007, roughly four or so months prior to the most recent NIE’s publication, Deputy Director of Analysis Thomas Fingar gave the following testimony before the House Armed Services Committee (emphasis added):
Iran and North Korea are the states of most concern to us. The United States’ concerns about Iran are shared by many nations, including many of Iran’s neighbors. Iran is continuing to pursue uranium enrichment and has shown more interest in protracting negotiations and working to delay and diminish the impact of UNSC sanctions than in reaching an acceptable diplomatic solution. We assess that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons--despite its international obligations and international pressure. This is a grave concern to the other countries in the region whose security would be threatened should Iran acquire nuclear weapons.
This paragraph appeared under the subheading: "Iran Assessed As Determined to Develop Nuclear Weapons." And the entirety of Fingar’s 22-page testimony was labeled "Information as of July 11, 2007." No part of it is consistent with the latest NIE, in which our spooks tell us Iran suspended its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003 "primarily in response to international pressure" and they "do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons."
The inconsistencies are more troubling when we realize that, according to the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Fingar is one of the three officials who were responsible for crafting the latest NIE. The Journal cites "an intelligence source" as describing Fingar and his two colleagues as "hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials." (The New York Sun drew attention to one of Fingar’s colleagues yesterday.)
So, if it is true that Dr. Fingar played a leading role in crafting this latest NIE, then we are left with serious questions:
Why did your opinion change so drastically in just four months time?
Is the new intelligence or analysis really that good? Is it good enough to overturn your previous assessments? Or, has it never really been good enough to make a definitive assessment at all?
Did your political or ideological leanings, or your policy preferences, or those of your colleagues, influence your opinion in any way?
Many in the mainstream press have been willing to cite this latest NIE unquestioningly. Perhaps they should start asking some pointed questions. (Don’t hold your breath.)
thompson thinks iran is responsible for the report. repubs are idiots
You've overdosed on Bush and are so high you can't see straight. The NIE report was not put out by democrats. Can't you repugnants get that fact straight?
Xray's posts are proof of that.
Joe how come you don't answer my post #26, this thread.
How come the second NIE report is accurate but the first
NIE report is junk. How come one of the authors, Fingar,
was talking about them building a bomb in July of this year
just four months ago (post #29) but now help say that they quit in
2003. Bush didn't write these reports. These are suppose
to help our government make decisions. I see how you
react, if it hurts Bush, good report. If it helps Bush, bad report. And
you have the Gaul to accuse me of being closed minded.
If there was an agenda of the writers why wouldn't someone in the Bush administration say something about it?
This notion that these people were 'out to get bush' is preposterous. IF that were the case these people deserved to be fired and publicly admonished. I can live with questioning the accuracy of the report because we honestly don't know 100% for sure either way. but to dismiss the NIE outright because you think there has got to an agenda is stupid... you don't like what it says so let's attack the messenger..!
your right this all a conspiracy to get bush.. if we only had done what you have suggested before we started the unecessary war.. oh well at least now the resident war s are questioning the intel..
if only the awar s would have asked some pointed questions before starting a war...
so now the war s are flip flopping on NIEs.. they like them..then they don't like them... intel doesn't need to questioned.. now pointed questions are needed on intel.. it's hard to keep up with you guys..
I never said the first NIE report was junk did I? What I'm saying is Bush's war rhetoric never changes no matter what the evidence shows.
You react the same way. If it help Bush you like it if it hurts him you don't. Works both ways right? Bush has been proven wrong so many times. NO WMD. And Cheney still believes Iraq was responsible for 911.
How you can put credibility into what Bush said is beyond me...and many others for that matter. Even Newt says Bush's credibility has been damaged.
Now Bush is wrong for being consistent? He should
be more like Kerry, I vote for it, before I voted against it.
Or Billary, I was tricked into voting for going to war.
And Joe, they did, and I have said this many times,
have WMD, they used it numerous times. The question
is what did they do with it? Where did it go. Why did
he still "pretend" that he had WMD.
Bush nor Cheny did not start the Iraq war on their own,
Congress voted TWICE for the war. They demanded to
be in on the choice, or do you remember that?
Bush depended on an NIE to go to war and they were
wrong (Intel). The missed on Libya trying for the bomb,
they missed on Syra going for the bomb and missed
on North Korea. No I have good reason to have my
doubts about anything they push one way or the other.
I disagree. And why is being consistent such a great thing? In some instances it is but when the evidence proves otherwise I feel it take a better man to admit he was wrong and change his mind. I've done it myself quite a few times.
Are you saying that changing one's opinion is a bad thing?
To me, that is Bush's problem. He is too hard headed to change and change can be a very good thing.
I know Iraq DID have WMD but they were NOT an immediate danger to the US at the time Bush and Cheney were pushing the war. Those simply were not the facts. I also feel that there was Intel that was correct but Cheney, who I feel was the true architect of the Iraq war didn't want to hear or see it.
The article says why.
The first NIE assumed the worst.
Bush was annoyed with the lack of hard intelligence.
The CIA got more hard intelligence.
So the second report is better.
Bush is better-informed; Rice is vindicated; Cheney is frustrated.
I didn't know that.
Here's Bolton, having smeared the intel community yesterday, pointing out the flaws in the 2007 NIE:
The Flaws In the Iran Report
By John R. Bolton
Thursday, December 6, 2007; A29
Rarely has a do ent from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the "intelligence community" on issues such as Iraq's weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.
All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.
Consider these flaws in the NIE's "key judgments," which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.
First, the headline finding -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout."
The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.
Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of "intelligence."
Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was "possible" but not "likely" that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from -- of all places -- an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that "we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.
Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.
Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as "intelligence judgments."
That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this "intelligence" torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.
John R. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad." He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Ins ute.
=============
Believing this NIE after the totally wrong NIE about Saddam having WMD is difficult. The Iraq NIE was wrong and this 2007 Iran NIE is right?
With spooks and a WH that is a bunch of venal, lying assholes, it's almost impossible to know what the "reality" is.
Iran having nuclear bombs AND considering them a threat to use them.
hmm, why would Iran use nukes and risk total destruction by retaliation from US and Israel when Russia, which had many nukes AND the ICBM's to deliver them to the USA, sat on their nukes in a stand-off of MAD/Mutually Assured Destruction?
I hear the "balance of power between USA and Iran" thrown around. What balance of power? Iran has nowhere near the military and industry power that the USA has. How are they so powerful, even with a few nukes in a few years, that Iran's power has to be countervailed by USA' power?
The report is over a year old...Bolton is delusional....Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data
...back to the original topic...
What's Really Wrong With the M$M?
Eric Alterman
The Nation gets itOf course, far more is wrong with the mainstream media than can be described, or even enumerated, in one column. But let's give it a shot, using only items that have come up since my last column, all of which speak to the issue of why its members have forfeited our collective trust.
1. Its members consistently defer to conservative Republican Presidents with a history of deliberate deception, allowing them to define their terms. "One of the reasons for not was, you know, honestly, a concern that because the White House has contended that this is not a civil war, that using the phrase amounted to a kind of unnecessary political statement."--Bill Keller, executive editor, New York Times.
2. Its members invite Republican Congressmen, known to be not merely unreliable but delusional, to lie about Democratic Congressmen. When challenged, they reply that they cannot be bothered to discern the truth: Time's Joe Klein, a pundit who terms the Democratic Party "a party with absolutely no redeeming social value," one whose members "make fools of themselves even when they speak the truth," recently informed the magazine's readers that "tone-deaf" Democrats in the House had passed legislation that "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an ins ution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only," and thereby "give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." The liberal blogosphere, led by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, demonstrated that this statement was categorically false, as the bill reads: "A court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." Time eventually printed a correction but refused to adjudicate between truth and falsehood, claiming merely that Democrats and Republicans interpret the bill differently. Klein shrugged off criticism by saying, "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." Later Republican Peter Hoekstra, who is also on record insisting that the United States had discovered a WMD program in Iraq but that the CIA had conspired to cover it up, revealed that he had been a key source for Klein's reporting.
3. Its members invite conservative Republican individuals known to be insane, unbalanced and unconcerned with the truth to lie about Democratic presidential candidates on the front page of their newspapers and when confronted respond that it is not their job to determine the truth. The Washington Post's Perry Bacon published a recent front-page article giving voice to right-wing paranoids, racists and assorted hatemongers who insist that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim. Sources included the Moonie-financed Insight online magazine, Human Events (home to Ann Coulter), demagogues Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, and some guy who posted on the Internet somewhere. Beyond the Obama campaign's denials, nowhere in the piece did Bacon inform readers that these allegations are demonstrably false. In an online chat, the paper's Lois Romano explicitly defended the practice, claiming that "airing some of this and giving a chance to deny its accuracy could be viewed as setting the record straight." ......(more)
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