Fair & balanced FOX report on Iran NIE

This report is fairly "fair & balanced," although... who cares what Rush Limbaugh thinks of the NIE? That's just FOX throwing a bone to its readers. But anyway... this is worth a read.


Bush Administration Credibility Suffers After Iran NIE Report
By Greg Simmons
December 07, 2007 | FOXNews.com

The new National Intelligence Estimate — which says Iran had a nuclear weapons development program, but halted it in 2003 — made President Bush's week play out like a sad country song.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was smiling and called the report a victory. Rush Limbaugh blasted the report as a product of administration sabotage. And Democrats were accusing the president of being a flip-flopper.

The NIE drew fire from nearly all sides, including anti-war Democrats in Congress, foreign leaders the administration needs to hold the line against Iran, and conservatives usually supportive of the administration.

The root issue for many critics comes down to credibility: Credibility of the estimate, credibility of the intelligence community that developed it and the credibility of the administration for whom those agencies work. Bridging that credibility gap might prove difficult for an administration heading into its final months.

The administration remains resolute in its position that policy toward Iran shouldn't change. This is because while the NIE said with "high confidence" that the program halted in 2003, the estimate only says with "moderate confidence" that it had not started up again earlier this year, and "moderate-to-high" confidence that it remained off-line as the report was being released.

Because the report also says Tehran maintains a civilian nuclear program, and the estimate is silent on whether Iran intends to start up its nuclear weapons program again, U.S. officials say this means the United States and other countries must be ever-vigilant against the possibility.

But convincing people here and abroad of that argument now appears to be more difficult.

U.S. hardliners on Iran are saying the intelligence document is too ridden with internal political squabbles to be credible.

"That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling," John Bolton, one of the chief proponents of sanctions to stop the Iranian weapons program, wrote Thursday's Washington Post.

Republican presidential contender Fred Thompson drew his line in the sand, issuing a statement saying: "The accuracy of the latest NIE on Iran should be received with a good deal of skepticism. Our intelligence community has often underestimated the intentions of adversaries, including Saddam Hussein's Iraq and North Korea."

Saying the report is "awfully convenient for a lot of people," Thompson continued, "the administration gets to say its policies worked; the Democrats get to claim we should have eased up on Iran a long time ago: and Russia and China can claim sanctions on Iran are not necessary. Who benefits from all this? Iran."

The Wall Street Journal editorial page — one of many conservative opinion-makers to question the report authors' credibility — wrote Wednesday: "Our own 'confidence' is not heightened by the fact that the NIE's main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as 'hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials.' " The Journal named former State Department officials Tom Fingar, Vann Van Diepin and Kenneth Brill.

Conservative talk radio, which is widely credited with helping destroy support for the immigration reform bill supported by the president last year, is also less than glowing toward the report. "I guarantee there's more sabotage coming out of that place regarding the Bush administration," Rush Limbaugh said of the State Department.

International troubles were just as quick to appear.

The Associated Press quotes a top Czech official saying it is now harder to do his job explaining the need for a U.S. missile defense system, which U.S. officials say is needed to ward off attack from Iran.

"Czech newspapers are full of headlines saying there is no longer a need for missile defense. ... It is hard for complex arguments to win against simple headlines," said Tomas Klvana, according to the AP.

The administration has dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others to try to allay European allies over the meaning of the report — chiefly Russia, which already his highly suspicious of the U.S. missile program, and other top allies France, Germany and the U.K.

Israel — constantly in the bull's eye of Iran's militaristic rhetoric — was no more heartened by the report.

"We cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the Earth, even if it is from our greatest friend," Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Wednesday, according to the AP. A statement from Israeli President Simon Peres' office said intelligence assessments from around the world have later proved faulty — but did not specifically mention the 2002 U.S. NIE on Iraq, which has since been almost entirely discredited.

Democrats who are always on the lookout for a good shot at Bush took no time in using the new NIE as their latest talking point to show the administration doesn't know which way is up.

At Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate in Iowa, Sen. Barack Obama said: "I think Iran continues to be a threat to some of its neighbors in the region. ... But it is absolutely clear that this administration and President Bush continues to not let facts get in the way of his ideology. "

Sen. Hillary Clinton said: "I'm relieved that the intelligence community has reached this conclusion, but I vehemently disagree with the president that nothing's changed and therefore nothing in American policy has to change."

And former senator John Edwards: "What I believe is that this president, who just a few weeks ago was talking about World War III, he, the vice president, the neocons have been on a march to possible war with Iran for a long time. ... It's absolutely clear and eerily similar to what we saw with Iraq, where they were headed."

Capitol Hill Democrats were no less sympathetic, and several complained that Bush was speaking out of turn in October when he suggested Iran was still a threat. Opponents say he was first told about a possible reversal in August and should not have been ratcheting up the rhetoric between then and now.

"I am growing increasingly concerned about the White Houses inconsistent explanations of when the president was told about important new intelligence information regarding Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday. "It appears the president and vice president were briefed in August on this information, before both the president and vice president began to ratchet up their increasingly-heated rhetoric on the threat of Iran."

And House Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel said Tuesday the report just proves that "The last seven years in the Mideast by this administration have been the lost seven years when you see on every front a reversal."

Defending the Report

For its part, the administration is standing firmly behind the document's findings.

"I appreciate the work of our intelligence community in helping us better understand Iran's past and present nuclear activities. Their information is critical in increasing our understanding and helping us develop a sound policy," Bush said, speaking to reporters in Omaha, Neb., on Wednesday.

Bush said the NIE shows Iran "has more to explain" about its nuclear program, and called on Tehran to "come clean with the international community."

On Thursday, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino continued to take on critics, saying the president has been consistent, both with the threat posed by Iran and his responses to questions about that threat in the facing of new intelligence.

"We just found out that Iran has a covert nuclear weapons program. It proved that we were right and that international pressure is what caused them to halt it," Perino told FOX News. "The criticism (of Bush) is completely misplaced. The liar is (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran. He's the one who has hidden the program."

A number of observers say the report's intentions are true, and it is credible enough to use in determining U.S. policy toward Iran.

FOX News military analyst Ret. Marine Lt. Col. Bill Cowan said he thinks the report is basically credible — but acknowledges credibility is a problem for the administration. The problem lies in the fact that the two reports — the one from 2007 and the one from 2005 — are so drastically different.

Leading up to Monday's report, he said, "We've got all this stuff about they're two years away from bomb, they're two weeks from a bomb. ... And suddenly, they're not even making a bomb."

"All of a sudden, you know, in one day, we have a new NIE comes out that really flip-flops one-eighty, and says they quit working on it back in '03. I would say we have a major credibility issue," Cowan said.

But he said — in contradiction to those like former U.N. Ambassador Bolton — that doesn't mean the report itself is flawed. He said he has faith in National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell to put together a good report, and he credited efforts to bring in non-consensus opinions — an effort intelligence officials say is to try and prevent another situation like the infamous 2002 Iraq NIE.

Cowan said he believes the administration, with new NIE in hand, needs to go back, vet past reports and re-evaluate its policy. He said he thinks the NIE means policy will change, but not dramatically.

"Some of the rhetoric is going to have to change, and like the president said, we're going to have to keep the international pressure on the Iranians, but maybe the U.S [will] back off a little bit," and rely more the United Nations and foreign allies, he said.

Ellen Laipson, a former member of the National Intelligence Council who now is president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C., defense policy think tank, also vouched for the authenticity of the report in a column posted on her group's Web site.

"Clearly, the methodology that produced these new judgments about Iran's nuclear weapons activity was subjected to months of scrutiny and debate," Laipson said, adding that the "intelligence community had the courage and intellectual honesty to compare its new conclusions to past judgments."

In her article, Laipson said the NIE will result in making diplomacy "the only acceptable tool" for dealing with Iran, as opposed to military intervention. "This is a net win for international peace and security," she said. Laipson was not immediately available to comment Thursday.

Joshua Muravchik, an Iran policy scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said the report basically only shifts out the problem of Iran possibly having a nuclear weapon — it doesn't show the problem has disappeared.

"I don't think this whole thing really changed the picture in any way," Muravchik said.

He said he doesn't believe there is any more of a credibility issue with this latest NIE as there was with any others.

"NIE is the highest product of their intelligence community. ... The fact that it's our highest product does not mean at all that they're flawless," he said, pointing to another NIE in 1950 that all but ruled out the chance that North Korea would invade South Korea. Later that year the Korean War broke out.

Most of the reports' critics are missing the point, a former national security official who has served in previous administrations, told FOXNews.com, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Critics seem "to have overlooked the importance of the fact that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, and Iran continues to be advancing along the path most critical to the earliest acquisition of those weapons" — that critical path being the continuation of uranium enrichment.

"They're reacting to one element of the report rather than analyzing the whole thing, and figuring out what the implications are," the official added.

The official said that, contrary to what some are saying, the report "argues for maintaining a very focused, concentrated, determined effort" to stop Iran's march toward nuclear weapons, adding: "There is no basis in my view for relaxing or for believing that the Iranian nuclear program is less worrisome, or less requiring of urgent attention than before."

New Iran NIE 'a piece of crap'

This flabbergasts me. But I know it shouldn't. The neocon right's response to the new NIE estimate on Iran has been swift and fierce.

Here is just one example of neocon spin control by Human Events' Jed Babbin.

Babbin says we can't believe the CIA or the State Dept's Bureau of Intel and Research because they're so hopelessly incompetent. And now they're "anti-Bush." So that leaves us... where? Neocons respond: Iran is an enemy, a danger, a threat, and America should treat them as such, despite what our intelligence community tells us.

Here's one particularly shocking excerpt:

"Let's face facts: six years after 9-11, four years after the invasion of Iraq, US intelligence community is still unable to tell the president most of the things he needs to know about Iran, North Korea and the other nations that pose a danger to American security. That lack of knowledge heightens the danger created by reports such as the new NIE."

Did you catch the logical fallacy? If U.S. intelligence is so awful, how can we "know" that Iran and North Korea pose such a danger in the first place? Are we supposed to take it on faith, like we did with Saddam? Neocons respond: In the absence of reliable information, you gotta go with your gut -- or their gut, rather. And their gastric rumblings tell them to gear up for WWIII, with or without a reason.

U.S. Intel: Iran halted nuke program in 2003

This is very good news. But as I've said before, it's hard to make predictions about another country's secretive nuclear program. In any case, this report should silence any talk of pre-emptive military strikes on Iran in the near future. This latest N.I.E. report could be wrong, but it certainly does not give Bush-Cheney any excuse to hastily attack Iran without threat or provocation.


U.S. says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work

By Mark Mazzetti
December 3, 2007 | New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran was working inexorably toward building a bomb.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to be a major factor in the tense international negotiations aimed at getting Iran to halt its nuclear energy program. Concerns about Iran were raised sharply after President Bush had suggested in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to "World War III," and Vice President Dick Cheney promised "serious consequences" if the government in Tehran did not abandon its nuclear program.

The finding also come in the middle of a presidential campaign during which a possible military strike against Iran's nuclear program has been discussed. The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran's ultimate intentions about gaining a nuclear weapon remain unclear, but that Iran's "decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs."

[In other words, Iran's leaders are not crazy. They think and act rationally. -- J ]

"Some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways might — if perceived by Iran's leaders as credible — prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program," the estimate states.

The new report comes out just over five years after a deeply flawed N.I.E. concluded that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons programs and was determined to restart its nuclear program. The report led to congressional authorization for a military invasion of Iraq, although most of the N.I.E.'s conclusions turned out to be wrong. The estimate does say that Iran's ultimate goal is still to develop the capability to produce a nuclear weapon.

The national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, quickly issued a statement describing the N.I.E. as containing positive news rather than reflecting intelligence mistakes. "It confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons," Mr. Hadley said. "It tells us that we have made progress in trying to ensure that this does not happen. But the intelligence also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem."

"The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically — without the use of force — as the administration has been trying to do," Mr. Hadley said.

Last month, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the international Atomic Energy Agency, had reported that Iran was operating 3,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges, capable of producing fissile material for nuclear weapons.

But his report said that I.A.E.A. inspectors in Iran had been unable to determine whether the Iranian program sought only to generate electricity or also to build weapons.

The N.I.E. concludes that if Iran were to end the freeze of its weapons program, it would still be at least two years before Tehran would have enough highly enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb. But it says it is still "very unlikely" Iran could produce enough of the material by then.

Instead, today's report concludes it is more likely Iran could have a bomb by the early part to the middle of the next decade. The report states that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research judges Iran is unlikely to achieve this goal before 2013, "because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems."

The new assessment upends a judgment made about Iran's nuclear capabilities in 2005. At the time, intelligence agencies assessed with "high confidence" that Iran is determined to have nuclear weapons and concluded that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons program.

Since then, officials said they have obtained new information leading them to conclude that international pressure, including tough economic sanctions, had been successful in bringing about a halt to Iran's secret program.

"We felt that we needed to scrub all the assessments and sources to make sure we weren't misleading ourselves," said one senior intelligence official during a telephone interview, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In a separate statement accompanying the N.I.E., Deputy Director of National Intelligence Donald M. Kerr said that given the new conclusions, it was important to release the report publicly "to ensure that an accurate presentation is available."

CIA officers: Tenet told Bush Saddam had no WMD

Wow! This expose on Bush's knowledge that Saddam had no WMD is definitely a bombshell – but not a chemical or biological one, har-har-har.

Seriously though, you have to ask yourself: If Bush and his cronies lied to make the case for invading Iraq, what would stop them from lying to keep us there?

Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction

Salon exclusive: Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq.

By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com | September 6, 2007

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

On April 23, 2006, CBS's "60 Minutes" interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. "We continued to validate him the whole way through," said Drumheller. "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller's account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri's intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.

Secretary of State Powell, in preparation for his presentation of evidence of Saddam's WMD to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, spent days at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and had Tenet sit directly behind him as a sign of credibility. But Tenet, according to the sources, never told Powell about existing intelligence that there were no WMD, and Powell's speech was later revealed to be a series of falsehoods.

Both the French intelligence service and the CIA paid Sabri hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least $200,000 in the case of the CIA) to give them documents on Saddam's WMD programs. "The information detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissible material, which they didn't, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons," one of the former CIA officers told me.

On the eve of Sabri's appearance at the United Nations in September 2002 to present Saddam's case, the officer in charge of this operation met in New York with a "cutout" who had debriefed Sabri for the CIA. Then the officer flew to Washington, where he met with CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, who was "excited" about the report. Nonetheless, McLaughlin expressed his reservations. He said that Sabri's information was at odds with "our best source." That source was code-named "Curveball," later exposed as a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer.

[The White House leaked the discredited INC defector "Curveball" as a source to the New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who dutifully hyped Saddam's WMD and the case for war. "Curveball" ended up being the brother of Ahmad Chalabi's chief aide. Chalabi was a top member of the Iraqi National Congress in exile, who received $ millions from the U.S. Gov't. prior to the Iraq invasion. Chalabi was also Judith Miller's main source on Iraq's "existent" WMD program in a series of award-winning stories she wrote in 2001-2002. The Times was later forced to print an apology because of those stories, although its editors never disciplined Miller.

That's the lib'rul media for you, always criticizing George W. Bush! – J]

The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. "Tenet told me he briefed the president personally," said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush's response was to call the information "the same old thing." Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. "The president had no interest in the intelligence," said the CIA officer. The other officer said, "Bush didn't give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up."

But the CIA officers working on the Sabri case kept collecting information. "We checked on everything he told us." French intelligence eavesdropped on his telephone conversations and shared them with the CIA. These taps "validated" Sabri's claims, according to one of the CIA officers. The officers brought this material to the attention of the newly formed Iraqi Operations Group within the CIA. But those in charge of the IOG were on a mission to prove that Saddam did have WMD and would not give credit to anything that came from the French. "They kept saying the French were trying to undermine the war," said one of the CIA officers.

The officers continued to insist on the significance of Sabri's information, but one of Tenet's deputies told them, "You haven't figured this out yet. This isn't about intelligence. It's about regime change."

The CIA officers on the case awaited the report they had submitted on Sabri to be circulated back to them, but they never received it. They learned later that a new report had been written. "It was written by someone in the agency, but unclear who or where, it was so tightly controlled. They knew what would please the White House. They knew what the king wanted," one of the officers told me.

That report contained a false preamble stating that Saddam was "aggressively and covertly developing" nuclear weapons and that he already possessed chemical and biological weapons. "Totally out of whack," said one of the CIA officers. "The first [para]graph of an intelligence report is the most important and most read and colors the rest of the report." He pointed out that the case officer who wrote the initial report had not written the preamble and the new memo. "That's not what the original memo said."

The report with the misleading introduction was given to Dearlove of MI6, who briefed the prime minister. "They were given a scaled-down version of the report," said one of the CIA officers. "It was a summary given for liaison, with the sourcing taken out. They showed the British the statement Saddam was pursuing an aggressive program, and rewrote the report to attempt to support that statement. It was insidious. Blair bought it." "Blair was duped," said the other CIA officer. "He was shown the altered report."

The information provided by Sabri was considered so sensitive that it was never shown to those who assembled the NIE on Iraqi WMD. Later revealed to be utterly wrong, the NIE read: "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

In the congressional debate over the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, even those voting against it gave credence to the notion that Saddam possessed WMD. Even a leading opponent such as Sen. Bob Graham, then the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had instigated the production of the NIE, declared in his floor speech on Oct. 12, 2002, "Saddam Hussein's regime has chemical and biological weapons and is trying to get nuclear capacity." Not a single senator contested otherwise. None of them had an inkling of the Sabri intelligence.

The CIA officers assigned to Sabri still argued within the agency that his information must be taken seriously, but instead the administration preferred to rely on Curveball. Drumheller learned from the German intelligence service that held Curveball that it considered him and his claims about WMD to be highly unreliable. But the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) insisted that Curveball was credible because what he said was supposedly congruent with available public information.

For two months, Drumheller fought against the use of Curveball, raising the red flag that he was likely a fraud, as he turned out to be. "Oh, my! I hope that's not true," said Deputy Director McLaughlin, according to Drumheller's book "On the Brink," published in 2006. When Curveball's information was put into Bush's Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address, McLaughlin and Tenet allowed it to pass into the speech. "From three Iraqi defectors," Bush declared, "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs ... Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them." In fact, there was only one Iraqi source -- Curveball -- and there were no labs.

When the mobile weapons labs were inserted into the draft of Powell's United Nations speech, Drumheller strongly objected again and believed that the error had been removed. He was shocked watching Powell's speech. "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," Powell announced. Without the reference to the mobile weapons labs, there was no image of a threat.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, and Powell himself later lamented that they had not been warned about Curveball. And McLaughlin told the Washington Post in 2006, "If someone had made these doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used in Secretary Powell's speech." But, in fact, Drumheller's caution was ignored.

As war appeared imminent, the CIA officers on the Sabri case tried to arrange his defection in order to demonstrate that he stood by his information. But he would not leave without bringing out his entire family. "He dithered," said one former CIA officer. And the war came before his escape could be handled.

Tellingly, Sabri's picture was never put on the deck of playing cards of former Saddam officials to be hunted down, a tacit acknowledgment of his covert relationship with the CIA. Today, Sabri lives in Qatar.

In 2005, the Silberman-Robb commission investigating intelligence in the Iraq war failed to interview the case officer directly involved with Sabri; instead its report blamed the entire WMD fiasco on "groupthink" at the CIA. "They didn't want to trace this back to the White House," said the officer.

On Feb. 5, 2004, Tenet delivered a speech at Georgetown University that alluded to Sabri and defended his position on the existence of WMD, which, even then, he contended would still be found. "Several sensitive reports crossed my desk from two sources characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable," he said. "The first from a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle" -- Naji Sabri -- "said Iraq was not in the possession of a nuclear weapon. However, Iraq was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon."

Then Tenet claimed with assurance, "The same source said that Iraq was stockpiling chemical weapons." He explained that this intelligence had been central to his belief in the reason for war. "As this information and other sensitive information came across my desk, it solidified and reinforced the judgments that we had reached in my own view of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and I conveyed this view to our nation's leaders." (Tenet doesn't mention Sabri in his recently published memoir, "At the Center of the Storm.")

But where were the WMD? "Now, I'm sure you're all asking, 'Why haven't we found the weapons?' I've told you the search must continue and it will be difficult."

On Sept. 8, 2006, three Republican senators on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- Orrin Hatch, Saxby Chambliss and Pat Roberts -- signed a letter attempting to counter Drumheller's revelation about Sabri on "60 Minutes": "All of the information about this case so far indicates that the information from this source was that Iraq did have WMD programs." The Republicans also quoted Tenet, who had testified before the committee in July 2006 that Drumheller had "mischaracterized" the intelligence. Still, Drumheller stuck to his guns, telling Reuters, "We have differing interpretations, and I think mine's right."

One of the former senior CIA officers told me that despite the certitude of the three Republican senators, the Senate committee never had the original memo on Sabri. "The committee never got that report," he said. "The material was hidden or lost, and because it was a restricted case, a lot of it was done in hard copy. The whole thing was fogged up, like Curveball."

While one Iraqi source told the CIA that there were no WMD, information that was true but distorted to prove the opposite, another Iraqi source was a fabricator whose lies were eagerly embraced. "The real tragedy is that they had a good source that they misused," said one of the former CIA officers. "The fact is there was nothing there, no threat. But Bush wanted to hear what he wanted to hear."

U.S. Nat'l Intel Estimate: 'Surge' not succeeding

Intelligence report at odds with U.S. policies on Iraq
By Damien Cave
August 24, 2007 | International Herald Tribune

BAGHDAD: The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate has effectively discredited the dominant American hypothesis of the past seven months: that safer streets, secured by additional troops, would create enough political calm for Iraq's leaders to reconcile.

They have failed to do so in part, suggests the report, which was released Thursday, because the security gains remain too modest to reverse Iraq's dynamic of violence and fear. Baghdad after all, remains a place where women at the market avoid buying river fish for fear that they've been eating bodies.

But just as important, according to Iraqi political analysts and officials, Iraq has become a cellular nation, dividing and redividing, where the constituency for chaos now outnumbers the constituency for compromise.

The central government has not held. Provinces and even neighborhoods have become the stage where power struggles play out, and as a result, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds - or elements of each faction - have come to feel that they could do a better job on their own.

"No one can rely on the political participants who lack a common view of the public interest," said Nabeel Mahmoud, an international relations professor at Baghdad University. "Such a concept is completely absent from the thinking of the political powers in Iraq's government, so each side works to get their own quota of positions or resources."

The Kurds are perhaps best positioned to benefit from the government's failures. Inside their already-autonomous area, cities like Erbil are experiencing a construction boom and already seem entirely disconnected from the rest of Iraqi life. This month the Kurds went even further, passing a regional oil law that would reach its full potential only if a national oil law was never implemented.

Shiites and Sunnis, however, are still the factions with the greatest responsibility for Iraq's political stalemate, and the ones most able to benefit from the dysfunctional status quo.

Shiites in particular, as the majority, have managed to take advantage of the weak government from a number of angles.

Various religious parties in majority-Shiite areas like Basra now openly fight for positions of power. Assassinations by Shiites of Shiite officials in the south have grown more common, and with huge oil wealth located in the region, interference from Baghdad remains entirely unwelcome.

Meanwhile, in the capital, offices run by the militia and civilian organization of the populist cleric Moktada al-Sadr have opened like franchises across the city. His Mahdi army, known as Jaish al-Mahdi, now controls businesses ranging from real estate to guns to gas.

One Mahdi commander from eastern Baghdad recently estimated that the Mahdi army controls 70 percent of the gas stations throughout the capital - a figure that is hard to verify but that falls in line with what American officials describe as a sophisticated network that combines brutality with business.

The American ambassador, Ryan Crocker, for example, recently titled the organization "Jaish al-Mahdi Incorporated."

Sadr, of course, does play a role in the government. Without the support of his party, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a fellow Shiite, would not have become prime minister. The Sadr bloc has expressed frustration with Maliki, repeatedly pulling out of the government to register discontent. And yet Sadr has yet to call for a replacement.

Many suppose that it is in part because he knows that a strong government supported by the Americans would likely crack down on what his organization has built.

"The people outside the law, the militia, the terrorists, the tribal leaders - all these people benefit," said Qasim Dawood, a Shiite member of Parliament. "There are people living on the crisis, gaining their power through the crisis."

New sources of power have also formed in the Sunni community. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in American reconstruction contracts have gone to Sunni tribal groups in Anbar who now work alongside the Americans to fight homegrown groups like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

Similar bands of Sunni "guardians," as the American military often calls them, have formed in Diyala Province and in Sunni areas of Baghdad.

Leaders from the groups have said they would like to join the government, but according to some American officers working with the groups, their most common demand has consisted of three things: money, guns and freedom of movement. It is unclear what they will do if they are not given what they consider a fair share of power.

Lieutenant Michael Hoffman, a platoon commander with the 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division in Baquba, recently described a scene in which some Baquba Guardians were outraged when he denied them an extraordinary share of a humanitarian food drop meant for some of the area's starved residents.

"There are still a lot of people who don't distinguish between being Baquba Guardians and their heritage," Hoffman said. He added that some of the volunteers he worked with had already quit.

Some Sunni leaders, nearly all of whom have pulled out of Iraq's government, said in recent weeks that they had no choice but to remain in opposition. Their communities view the government as completely opposed to Sunni interests, so signing on to legislation like a new oil law would be viewed as a mistake. Seeing the government work together - at a time when so many are invested in keeping it weak - would be seen as a cause for alarm, not celebration.

Undermining the government for some has become patriotic. As one senior Sunni leader, Saleh al-Mutlak, put it: "We have to satisfy people's frustrations."