U.S. lawmakers aren’t done cataloguing the nation’s
intelligence fiascoes on Iraq. Yet already they seem to be
forging ahead with similar blunders on Iran.
Exhibit A is a just-released “staff report” from the House
Intelligence Committee’s policy subcommittee purporting to
be a bipartisan guide on “Recognizing Iran as a Strategic
Threat.”
The report correctly urges more attention to intelligence
gathering.
But the 29-page document is largely a compendium of
exaggerations, scare talk and written sleight-of-hand
intended to focus narrowly on Iran’s threat, rather than on
the uncertainties or opportunities to delay Iran’s drive for
the bomb.
Committee spokesman Jamal Ware says the report “was designed
as a product to coalesce information in one place for the
American people to enable them to reach their own
conclusions.”
Calling it “literally, truly a bipartisan” effort, Ware said
the Republican chairman and the ranking Democratic member of
the subcommittee worked on it jointly.
Yet the report was written by just three staff members — two
Republicans and one Democrat. And Ware didn’t dispute that
the Republican staffer who put most of the words on paper
was Frederick Fleitz.
From 2001 to last year, Fleitz served as a CIA liaison in
John Bolton’s State Department office — and Bolton’s back
channel to the CIA as Bolton tried to gin up State
Department reporting on weapons threats.
Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that the House report seems
far more alarmist than some of the public sources from which
it supposedly draws.
(Access the report via this Web link:
intelligence.house.gov/Releases.aspx?A=76)
The report, for instance, quotes Director of National
Intelligence John Negroponte saying Iran could have a bomb
“sometime between the beginning of the next decade and the
middle of the next decade.”
Yet a full transcript of the June 2 BBC interview from which
the quote is drawn shows that Negroponte prefaces that with,
“We don’t have clear-cut knowledge,” and adds that the time
frame is just an estimate of when Iran “might be in a
position to have a nuclear weapon.”
The report says Iran already has produced enough uranium
hexafluoride for 12 bombs — citing a Reuters news story
rather than intelligence assessments. It fails to add that
there is no evidence that Iran has yet acquired the
uranium-enrichment infrastructure to produce such a quantity
of nuclear bomb fuel.
At the outset, the report states its conclusion that “Iran
is seeking nuclear weapons.” The possibility of a “denial
and deception” campaign is left to page 13.
The U.S. intelligence community’s own most recent
unclassified assessment to Congress on weapons capabilities,
for 2004, is far more cautious.
That 2004 weapons report — released publicly this year only
after The Plain Dealer questioned its continued
classification — says only that, “We remain concerned that
Tehran may have a clandestine nuclear weapons program.”
Negroponte himself pulled no punches about Tehran’s drive
for the bomb in recent congressional testimony. “We assess
that Iran seeks nuclear weapons,” he told the Senate
Intelligence Committee in February.
Yet Negroponte quickly added that, “We judge that Tehran
probably does not have a nuclear weapon and probably has not
yet produced or acquired the necessary fissile material.”
The U.S. intelligence czar also put Iran’s provocations
against Iraq in a regional context that dictates restraint,
because of Tehran’s desire not to mar its influence with
Iraqi Shiites or push its neighbor into a full-blown civil
war that could blow back over Iran’s borders.
The staff report quotes this observation — under the
headline, “How Iran is Destabilizing Iraq.”
Sullivan is The Plain Dealer’s foreign-affairs columnist and
an associate editor of the editorial pages.
© 2006 The Cleveland Plain Dealer
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