Bloodthirsty Liberal

Not of Iran. A couple of well-placed JDAMs and bunker-busters (or even a nasty computer virus) will put them in their place.

Be afraid of your government:

Mounting evidence over the last few years has convinced most experts that Iran has an active program to develop and construct nuclear weapons. Amazingly, however, these experts do not include the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community. They are unwilling to conduct a proper assessment of the Iranian nuclear issue—and so they remain at variance with the Obama White House, U.S. allies, and even the United Nations.

The last month alone has brought several alarming developments concerning Tehran’s nuclear program. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Yukiya Amano said last month that his agency has new information pointing to the military ambitions of Iran’s nuclear program. As of today, Iran has over 4,000 kilograms of low-enriched uranium—enough, according to the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, for four nuclear weapons if enriched to weapons grade.

Iran has accelerated its production of low-enriched uranium in defiance of U.N. and IAEA resolutions. It has also announced plans to install advanced centrifuge machines in a facility built deep inside a mountain near the city of Qom. According to several U.S. diplomats and experts, the facility is too small to be part of a peaceful nuclear program and appears specially constructed to enrich uranium to weapons grade.

To top this off, an item recently posted to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps website mused about the day after an Iranian nuclear test (saying, in a kind of taunt, that it would be a “normal day”). That message marked the first time any official Iranian comment suggested the country’s nuclear program is not entirely peaceful.

Despite all this, U.S. intelligence officials are standing by their assessment, first made in 2007, that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and has not restarted it since.

What kind of person doesn’t believe Iran is building nuclear weapons?

I have been permitted to say the following about the outside reviewers: Two of the four are former CIA analysts who work for the same liberal Washington, D.C., think tank. Neither served under cover, and their former CIA employment is well known. Another reviewer is a liberal university professor and strong critic of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. The fourth is a former senior intelligence official. Not surprisingly, the 2011 NIE included short laudatory excerpts from these reviewers that offered only very mild criticism.

It is unacceptable that Iran is on the brink of testing a nuclear weapon while our intelligence analysts continue to deny that an Iranian nuclear weapons program exists. One can’t underestimate the dangers posed to our country by a U.S. intelligence community that is unable to provide timely and objective analysis of such major threats to U.S. national security—or to make appropriate adjustments when it is proven wrong.

If U.S. intelligence agencies cannot or will not get this one right, what else are they missing?

Here’s hoping we live long enough to find out. I’m not holding my breath.

PS: Maybe there is a learning curve, however:

A senior Iranian legislator confirmed earlier reports saying that a US drone has been shot down by Iran over Fordo nuclear enrichment plant in the Central Qom province.

Member of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Ali Aqazadeh Dafsari said on Tuesday that the unmanned spy plane was flying near the Fordo nuclear enrichment plant in Qom province when the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC)’s Air Defense units brought it down.

The official stated that the US drone was on a mission to identify the location of the Fordo nuclear enrichment plant and gather information about the nuclear facility for the CIA, Dafsari stated.

As reader Marcus noted in a comment, truth isn’t within a thousand miles of this debate.

But to try to nudge it a little closer…

As I noted in a self-congratulatory comment of my own (if we don’t, who will?), we already knew a lot of this stuff. It’s been an open secret, for example, that the Arabs have as much or more to fear from a nuclear-armed Iran than anyone. That they have been telling us so in private should come as no surprise—neither should Israel’s smug look of satisfaction.

Mugabe is a despotic genius (i.e. a genius at despotism)—not exactly a bulletin.

Qaddafi’s certifiable—who knew?

The UN is a nest of spies—stop!

Just bear all that in mind when you read the offended responses:

Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s foreign minister, called the leaks “unhelpful and untimely” but told Agence France-Presse that he had not seen specific cables released by Wikileaks.

…

Local television news networks late Sunday night prominently highlighted a cable released by WikiLeaks that mentioned the Saudi King’s damning assessment of Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari.

On Monday morning, leading newspapers ran front-page coverage of the WikiLeaks documents. The News, a center-right newspaper that is critical of the current government, had a lead headline, “Zardari greatest obstacle to Pak progress: King Abdullah.” That was a reference to the King’s assertion that Mr. Zardari was an obstacle to Pakistan’s progress. “When the head is rotten,” the king was quoted as saying, “it affects the whole body.”

…

On his Twitter feed, P.J Crowley, a State Department spokesman, responds to what he says is the misleading idea that American diplomats are acting as spies, writing:

Contrary to some #Wikileaks’ reporting, our diplomats are diplomats. They are not intelligence assets.

Diplomats collect information that shapes our policies and actions. Diplomats for all nations do the same thing.

…

Issandr El Amrani, a journalist living in Cairo, writes on his blog the Arabist that the records of private conversations between American officials and Arab leaders released by WikiLeaks might reverberate much more strongly in the Arab world, where press freedom and government transparency are extremely limited.

There’s your international community for you. You can have it.

The name’s Assange, Julian Assange:

Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he fears.

He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends.

“By being determined to be on this path, and not to compromise, I’ve wound up in an extraordinary situation,” Mr. Assange said over lunch last Sunday, when he arrived sporting a woolen beanie and a wispy stubble and trailing a youthful entourage that included a filmmaker assigned to document any unpleasant surprises.

Unpleasant surprises? You mean like these?

[S]ome of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood.

Several WikiLeaks colleagues say he alone decided to release the Afghan documents without removing the names of Afghan intelligence sources for NATO troops. “We were very, very upset with that, and with the way he spoke about it afterwards,” said Birgitta Jonsdottir, a core WikiLeaks volunteer and a member of Iceland’s Parliament.

He is also being investigated in connection with accusations of rape and molestation involving two Swedish women. Mr. Assange has denied the allegations, saying the relations were consensual.

…

When Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old political activist in Iceland, questioned Mr. Assange’s judgment over a number of issues in an online exchange last month, Mr. Assange was uncompromising. “I don’t like your tone,” he said, according to a transcript. “If it continues, you’re out.”

Mr. Assange cast himself as indispensable. “I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest,” he said. “If you have a problem with me,” he told Mr. Snorrason, using an expletive, he should quit.

In an interview about the exchange, Mr. Snorrason’s conclusion was stark. “He is not in his right mind,” he said. In London, Mr. Assange was dismissive of all those who have criticized him. “These are not consequential people,” he said.

That our democracy is in the hands of a dweeby little twerp like Julian Assange makes me uncomfortable—but I’m not altogether opposed to what he’s doing.

With apologies to President Obama, let me quote accurately from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Government has no power to which we do not consent. To consent, we must have knowledge, information on which to make a judgement. There is certainly information contained in these leaked documents (Iran’s undeclared war against us, Iraq’s malfeasances, etc.) that would help form our opinion.

There is also, obviously, information that would endanger the lives of many people—and has. Governments and armies can’t conduct all their business in real time, in open session. We understand, and consent, to secrecy. But only up to a point. There is a natural and even healthy tension between the government’s desire for secrecy and the people’s right to know.

In trying to separate the person from the problem, I think that, absent a few redactions and emendations, the release of these documents could be healthy for our democracy.

Or I could be dead wrong.

Same [bleep], different president:

The Obama administration promised Congress on Tuesday to negotiate stronger privacy protections for Americans under terrorism surveillance but insisted on retaining current authority to track suspects and obtain records.

Liberals on the House Judiciary Committee were left unsatisfied, clearly wanting the administration to go further and pledge to curb what they consider abuses of the Bush administration.

They repeatedly insisted that the law be rewritten to require better justification for wiretaps and subpoenas, and Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., even compared the Obama administration’s position so far to that of the Bush administration.

“You sound like a lot of people who came over from DOJ (the Department of Justice) before,” Conyers told Todd Hinnen, deputy assistant attorney general.

Well, of course he does. President Obama may be misguided and overweening, but it does him no good to allow another 9/11 to happen on his watch. If it did, I’d stay below the eight floor if I were you.

They went to the site and collected soil samples

Maybe they could teach Europe how to grow a set.

An Israeli commando unit carried out a reconnaissance mission at an alleged Syrian nuclear reactor that was later destroyed by the Israel Air Force, the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported Thursday.

The 12-man unit was dropped by two helicopters onto the site, according to the report, where they proceeded to take soil samples and photographs.

The clandestine operation reportedly took place in August 2007, about a month before the IAF strike on the al-Kabir reactor in the country’s eastern desert, said the article. The piece was written by Hans Ruehle, former chief of the planning staff of the German Defense Ministry.
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Ruehle also reported that a top-ranked Iranian defector told the United States that Iran was financing North Korean moves to make Syria into a nuclear weapons power, leading to the Israeli air strike.

The article goes into detail about an Iranian connection and fills in gaps about Israel’s September 6, 2007, raid that is said to have knocked out Syria’s reportedly nearly-completed reactor.

Ali Reza Asghari, a retired general in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards and a former deputy defense minister, changed sides in February 2007 and provided considerable information to the West on Iran’s own nuclear program, the paper reported.

The biggest surprise, however, was his assertion that Iran was financing a secret nuclear project of Syria and North Korea, he said. No one in the American intelligence scene had heard anything of it. And the Israelis who were immediately informed also were completely unaware.

Ruehle, who did not identify the sources of his information, publishes and comments on security and nuclear proliferation in different European newspapers and broadcasts and has held prominent roles in German and NATO institutions.

U.S. intelligence had detected North Korean ship deliveries of construction supplies to Syria that started in 2002, and American satellites spotted the construction as early as 2003, but regarded the work as nothing unusual, in part because the Syrians had banned radio and telephones from the site and handled communications solely by messengers – medieval but effective, Ruehle said.

“The analysis was conclusive that it was a North Korean-type reactor, a gas graphite model,” Ruehle said.

Other sources have suggested that the reactor might have been large enough to make about one nuclear weapon’s worth of plutonium a year.

Just before the Israeli commando raid, a North Korean ship was intercepted en route to Syria with nuclear fuel rods, underscoring the need for fast action, he said.

On the morning of September 6, 2007, seven Israeli F-15 fighter bombers reportedly took off to the north. They flew along the Mediterranean coast, brushed past Turkey and pressed on into Syria. Fifty kilometers (30 miles) from their target they fired 22 rockets at the three identified objects inside the Kibar complex, according to Ruehle.

“The Syrians were completely surprised. By the time their air defense systems were ready, the Israeli planes were well out of range. The mission was successful, the reactor destroyed,” Ruehle said.

“Israel estimates that Iran had paid North Korea between $1 billion and $2 billion for the project,” Ruehle said.

Let’s see… George W. Bush defined the Axis of Evil. I know, there really is no such thing as evil, only man-caused disasters, but let’s try to remember anyway. Who was in the Axis of Evil? Was it Iran, Syria and North Korea? The article indicates that nobody knew that North Korea, Syria and Iran were participating in building this weapon, but I don’t buy it.

- Aggie

Yesterday, I greeted the nomination of Leon Panetta as CIA chief with a shrug.

Ralph Peters, it should be noted, profoundly disagrees:

WOULD you ask your accountant to perform brain surgery on your child? That’s the closest analogy I can find to the choice of Democratic Party hack Leon Panetta to head the CIA.

Earth to President-elect Obama: Intelligence is serious. And infernally complicated. When we politicize it – as we have for 16 years – we get 9/11. Or, yes, Iraq.

The extreme left, to which Panetta’s nomination panders, howled that Bush and Cheney corrupted the intelligence system. Well, I worked in the intel world in the mid 1990s and saw how the Clinton team undermined the system’s integrity.

Al Qaeda a serious threat? The Clinton White House didn’t want to hear it. Clinton was the pioneer in corrupting intelligence. Bush was just a follow-on homesteader.

Now we’ve fallen so low that left-wing cadres can applaud the nomination of a CIA chief whose sole qualification is that he’s a party loyalist, untainted by experience.

I’m certainly not going to defend the pick, especially against someone as informed and intelligent as Ralph Peters.

Especially when Sandy “Briefs in his Briefs” Burger will do so for me:

Panetta “was part of the decision-making process for every single issue we were dealing with, whether this was in the Oval Office with the president or the Cabinet Room — the Middle East, Kosovo, China. He was a part of a small group of people who advised the president how to proceed on strategy and substance.”

Besides, Panetta could smuggle the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in his jowls alone.

Can someone remind when and why the Clinton Administration became the good old days?

Bubba is like bell-bottoms: a hideous mistake that just won’t stay dead. I should know: I’m guilty of having taken part in both.

I have no problem with the Panetta appointment to lead the CIA. It’s a political job, and you need someone there whose loyalty is to you, not the culture of the organization, and who knows how Washington, and not necessarily how the Cambodian parliament (if there is such a thing), works. Leave the spying to the spies.

But I have to confess I love—love—who Obama wanted as his first choice:

The Obama team had struggled for weeks to find a suitable candidate for the CIA post, after passing over former high-ranking agency official John Brennan in December, largely because he was seen as too closely tied to the policies of the Bush administration. Brennan withdrew after his potential nomination drew outrage among civil rights and human rights groups.

They were considering him? A man with detainee blood on his hands (metaphorically speaking)? Where was I when this was discussed?

Bully for you, Obama! Bully! That shows you take the defense of your country more seriously than I thought you ever could. A pity you don’t have the courage of your convictions (never have, it becomes more apparent every day).

Anyhow, Panetta takes the role of Eeyore in the Hundred Acre Wood that is the Obama administration—with Obama as Christopher Robin, Rahm Emanuel as Pooh, and Hillary Clinton as Rabbit. I see James Carville as Piglet, but I may have taken this too far. (May have?)