Category Archives: Issues

OPINION: Bush’s real lie about Iran

Bush’s real lie about Iran
By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, Salon, December 7, 2007

The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program raises questions once again about the Bush administration’s veracity in describing a nuclear threat. But President Bush’s worst misrepresentations about the Iranian nuclear issue do not focus on whether Tehran is currently pursuing a nuclear weapons program or when Bush knew the U.S. intelligence community was revising its previous assessments. Rather, the real lie is the president’s claim that his administration has made a serious offer to negotiate with the Islamic Republic, and that Iranian intransigence is the only thing preventing a diplomatic resolution. [complete article]

See also, Intel report spurs calls for Iran talks (AP).

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OPINION: Torture is inevitably and inextricably bound to tyranny

The president-tyrant
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, December 9, 2007

It is common for people today to question how any leader can be a tyrant who achieves office through popular election, and, indeed, who remains popular. But such talk is foolish and betrays an ignorance of the origins of the term and the historical context of its use. Throughout history, tyrants came to power through means of control and manipulation of popular opinion. This was so familiar a feature to the thinkers of antiquity, that Aristotle charts it as a characteristic of the tyrant. And in the history of the dark, past century, how many little men in search of a balcony came to power on the back of a jubilant and cheering mob? And indeed, no less a man that Thomas Jefferson was quick to remind his fellow citizens of this principle. And it was Jefferson who raised the cry of “tyrant” against the president, when he proceeded in disregard of the constraints of Constitution and law, setting into play a plan of persecution targeting his political opponents and the poor, downtrodden and defenseless immigrants. Jefferson spoke sharply and loudly because the republic was under siege by a popularly elected (and popular) government. He was right to have done so, and he is vindicated by history for it.

The question was whether the president has put himself above the law and assumed powers far beyond those the Constitution measured to him.

And today, America faces precisely this question. We have a president who acts in shameless disregard of the Constitution’s restraints upon his office, and who feels himself above the law, and who constantly seeks to manipulate and mislead the public. How many times just in the last week have we witnessed this? [complete article]

See also, Democratic complicity in Bush’s torture regimen (Glenn Greenwald) and The Democrats and torture (Andrew Sullivan).

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OPINION & INTERVIEW: A process that can’t be faked

Saudis welcome Meshal in bid to broker new Hamas-Fatah talks
By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz, December 10, 2007

Saudi Arabia and Egypt are pushing Hamas and Fatah to meet in an effort to resolve the deep rift in the Palestinian movements, as Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal visits Riyadh this week.

Hamas spokesman Ayman Taha said that Meshal, who arrived in Riyadh on Saturday, would meet with senior Saudi officials to update them on the status of contact between Fatah and Hamas, which of late, has reached a dead-end.

A Fatah leader in the West Bank, Hatham Abed al-Kadr, said Sunday that Egypt has been in contact recently with Fatah and Hamas officials in attempt to bring the two sides for a meeting in Cairo after the culmination of the Eid al-Adha (Festival of the Sacrifice) in about two weeks. According to al-Kadr, the Egyptian mediation was aimed at opening negotiations between Hamas and Fatah. [complete article]

The Har Homa test
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, December 10, 2007

It is difficult to think of a place more suitable than Har Homa for holding the first test in the spirit of Annapolis. The comparison between Har Homa Crisis No. 2 and the development of Har Homa Crisis No. 1 can teach us whether the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has indeed started a new track or whether all the players are stuck on the old line.

Does Ehud Olmert, who pressed for the establishment of the new neighborhood in East Jerusalem, really see something different from the Prime Minister’s Bureau than what he saw from the office of the mayor of Jerusalem? Will President George W. Bush pay lip service and eventually have to eat his words, just as Bill Clinton did 10 years ago? [complete article]

Bottom-up peacebuilding in the Occupied Territories
Alastair Crooke interviewed by Aisling Byrne, Conflicts Forum, November, 2007

Can you describe your role in your former position as EU Middle East Envoy:

My role was to co-ordinate a bottom-up process to compliment a diplomatic top-down process – typically an effort by the diplomatic community or politicians to come up with an agreement; often quite simply are back of envelope-types of agreement. But unless this agreement has some connection with reality and is practical in terms of real power relationships and security, and has a certain acquiescence of support at the grassroots level, then the agreement will fail at this plane: it just can’t be implemented, or it just won’t be implemented because there isn’t the support or the conviction that this is a practical start. Issues then bounce between the political and implementation plane, and back to the political plane, and there is no effective outcome from it.

One of the lessons that came out of Northern Ireland was that it was important to work both at the political level, but also at the practical and the street level in order to make the two move in the same direction. Both had to be prepared in parallel. It wasn’t possible to come in at the top table and sit down with half a dozen people in Ramallah, agree on the back of an envelope a five-point plan and fly away the next day and think the job was done – because that was usually the stage when things became unpicked. [complete article]

London’s burning for Dichter
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz, December 9, 2007

Avi Dichter will not be going to London. The Israeli dream of taking in year-end sales, the new production of Othello or the sights of Oxford Street vanished before the public security minister’s very eyes. The Foreign Ministry advised Dichter not to participate in a conference there, because he could be arrested for involvement in the assassination of Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh, when he was Shin Bet security service head. The one-ton bomb used to target Shehadeh in 2002 left 15 people dead. [complete article]

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NEWS: After Guantanamo, ‘reintegration’ for Saudis

After Guantanamo, ‘reintegration’ for Saudis
By Josh White and Robin Wright, Washington Post, December 10, 2007

For five years, Jumah al-Dossari sat in a tiny cell at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, watched day and night by military captors who considered him one of the most dangerous terrorist suspects on the planet.

In July, he was suddenly released to his native Saudi Arabia, which held a very different view. Dossari was immediately reunited with his family and treated like a VIP. He was given a monthly stipend and a job, housed and fed, even promised help in finding a wife. Today, he is a free man living on the Persian Gulf coast.

The treatment is part of a Saudi “reintegration program” designed to help Dossari, 34, and other former Guantanamo prisoners adjust to modern society and learn the meanings of Islam. About 40 of the more than 100 Guantanamo detainees from Saudi Arabia who have been transferred to Riyadh since last year have been released after participating in the program, and the rest are scheduled to be let go in coming months. [complete article]

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NEWS, ANALYSIS & OPINION: Engaging Iran

Make Iran an offer it might refuse
By Fareed Zacharia, Newsweek, December 17, 2007

The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran has upended the Bush administration’s policy toward that country. This could be a good thing, if it leads to some creative rethinking. Over the past two years the administration has made several intelligent moves in its effort to isolate Iran—keeping the Europeans onboard, rallying the Arab states—but it’s been unwilling to make a simple choice. Do we want policy change in Iran or regime change?

Imagine, for a moment, what the world looks like to Iran. The country is surrounded by powerful states with nuclear weapons—Israel, India, Pakistan, China and Russia. Across one of its borders stand some 170,000 American troops (in Iraq), across another are more than 50,000 NATO troops (in Afghanistan). The United States has been bitterly opposed to the Iranian regime for three decades. The current American president has made clear time and again that he regards the Tehran government as evil and wishes that it would fall, and Congress set aside $75 million last year to “promote democracy” in Iran. Now, if you were in Tehran, wouldn’t you buy some insurance? And in the world of international politics, a nuclear program is the ultimate insurance policy.

For Washington to threaten a regime with extinction and simultaneously expect it to disarm is a policy doomed to failure. Were we to be clear that what we seek from Tehran is only a change in behavior, a policy of sticks and carrots might actually produce results. [complete article]

CIA has recruited Iranians to defect
By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2007

The CIA launched a secret program in 2005 designed to degrade Iran’s nuclear weapons program by persuading key officials to defect, an effort that has prompted a “handful” of significant departures, current and former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the operation say.

The previously undisclosed program, which CIA officials dubbed “the Brain Drain,” is part of a major intelligence push against Iran ordered by the White House two years ago.

Intelligence gathered as part of that campaign provided much of the basis for a U.S. report released last week that concluded the Islamic Republic had halted its nuclear weapons work in 2003. Officials declined to say how much of that intelligence could be attributed to the CIA program to recruit defectors. [complete article]

Meet ‘the decider’ of Tehran. He’s not the hothead you expect
By Vali Nasr, Washington Post, December 9, 2007

In the past, [Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not been averse to talking to Washington. He gave tacit support to an ill-fated memo offering direct U.S.-Iranian talks in 2003, and a year later, he publicly endorsed discussions over Iraq. But times changed after Iran dug in its heels over the nuclear issue and found itself looking down the barrels of U.S. guns. The threat of war has abated after this dramatic week, but for the man who rules Iran, two overriding concerns linger: ensuring that his regime survives and ensuring that he remains at the head of it. As the National Intelligence Estimate itself put it, “Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.” But Tehran’s decisions are also guided by one man, and anyone serious about understanding the sources of Iranian conduct needs to keep an eye on him. [complete article]

Iran snub of atomic pacts is denied
New York Times, December 9, 2007

A former nuclear negotiator for Iran dismissed reports that the country’s current negotiator had brushed off previous agreements with Europe over the Iranian nuclear program.

Ali Larijani, the former nuclear negotiator, who is now the representative of the supreme religious leader at the Supreme National Security Council, said Thursday that Western news media had fabricated the comments, the news agency ISNA reported. [complete article]

See also, A smart side to US intelligence (Kaveh L Afrasiabi), Just 18% believe Iran has stopped nuclear weapons development program (Rasmussen Reprots), Bolton calls report on Iran ‘quasi-putsch’ (Reuters), and What we didn’t learn from the hunt for Iraq’s phantom arsenal (veteran CIA case officer, Arthur Keller).

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ANALYSIS: Foreign policy shift

Bush engages foreign foes as policy shift accelerates
By Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2007

The White House said that President Bush sent a letter directly to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il seeking cooperation in implementing a pact to dismantle its nuclear arms in exchange for full normalized relations.

The move is the latest example of the White House accelerating its reversal on numerous foreign-policy fronts.

Earlier in his presidency, Mr. Bush designated Pyongyang a member of an “axis of evil” and expressed loathing for the communist state’s dictator. In recent months, however, contacts have picked up amid an accord on dismantling Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

On other fronts — particularly Iran, Syria and Lebanon — the Bush administration is also shifting tactics in ways that could affect American interests long-term, say U.S. officials and foreign policy analysts. President Bush is generally receiving praise for engaging Pyongyang and Damascus, but he is also risking alienating the Republican Party’s conservative wing, which believes the U-turns will undermine U.S. standing around the world.

“Our foreign policy is in free-fall at the moment,” said John Bolton, Mr. Bush’s former ambassador to the United Nations and an ally of Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Bolton argues that engaging dictators will only “diminish our prestige and influence.” [complete article]

At least he didn’t call him ‘Dear Leader’
By Donald Kirk, Asia Times, December 8, 2007

Don’t call him “North Korea’s leader”. Call him “Chairman” – or “Dear Chairman”.

That seems to be the first lesson in etiquette that President George W Bush was persuaded to follow when he acquiesced to suggestions that he personally sign a letter to Kim Jong-il appealing to him to come clean on all he’s got going in nuclear weapons program by the end of the year.

Kim comes by the “chairman” title as chairman of North Korea’s National Defense Commission, the wellspring of his “military first” policy that leaves no doubt the armed forces, under his control, hold ultimate power over the Workers’ Party, of which Kim is general secretary.

The decision for Bush to address him as “Chairman” rather than “Excellency” or the simple “Mr” alone symbolizes the climb-down from the hard line that Bush had made the hallmark of his policy on North Korea for the first two or three years of his presidency. [complete article]

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FEATURE: Intelligence reform

Nine little words in the NIE
By Thomas Powers, Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2007

Intelligence stories rarely get more complicated than this one. But this much is clear: Bush is the nation’s chief classification officer; he can make and unmake secrets at will. The White House says the president was briefed on the findings in the nearly 140-page report on Nov. 29, but the chief subject of that meeting was probably the question of declassification — whether to send the secret National Intelligence Estimate with its explosive first sentence to Congress and let it emerge in a slow agony of leaks over a matter of days or weeks, or to cauterize the wound and declassify the key judgments at the outset, hoping the argument would quickly burn itself out?

One of the basic laws of intelligence is that no big secret can be kept that can be written on the back of an envelope. No matter who first suggested declassification, it was the president who ultimately decided to release the nine words that reversed the conclusion of a previous intelligence assessment on Iran’s bomb program in 2005, and he did it because it was going to come out anyway.

One thing we know, from the document and from the fact of its declassification, is that reform of the intelligence community has apparently worked. The creation of Mike McConnell’s job as director of national intelligence has successfully insulated the CIA from pressure by the White House of the sort that played such a big role in the Iraq WMD fiasco. To call the new NIE “inconvenient” is simply another way of saying that it is not politicized. It is free from influence by policymakers. It represents the honest conclusion of the analysts given the job of deciding whether Tehran was trying to build a bomb. The fact that the NIE says what it says, and its release, both show that the White House has lost control over American intelligence. This good news probably needs a lot of hedging and qualification, but it is good all the same. [complete article]

Revisiting intelligence reform
By Tim Shorrock, FPIF, December 6, 2007

As the Bush administration winds up nearly seven years of intelligence fiascos, a quiet revolution has been going on at the Pentagon, which controls more than 80% of America’s $60 billion intelligence budget. Since taking over from Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense in winter 2006, Robert Gates has greatly scaled down the Pentagon’s footprint on national security policy and intelligence. Working closely with Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Michael McConnell, he has slowly begun to assert civilian control over the key spy agencies funded by the defense budget and halted the Pentagon’s efforts to create its own intelligence apparatus independent of the CIA. The recent intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, in contradicting early administration assertions, is perhaps the most significant sign of this newly won independence.

Those are significant actions. Under Rumsfeld, the Pentagon had become the dominant force in U.S. intelligence, with vast new powers in human intelligence and counterterrorism, both at home and abroad. By 2005, it was deploying secret commando units on clandestine missions in countries as far afield as the Philippines and Ecuador, sometimes without consulting with the local U.S. ambassadors and CIA station chiefs. At some point, President George W. Bush and his national security team apparently decided that the genie had to be put in the bottle, and sent Gates – a former CIA director who had worked closely with Vice President Dick Cheney during the first Bush administration – to put the kibosh on Rumsfeld’s private intelligence army.

But these efforts by Gates and McConnell to demilitarize U.S. Intelligence will never succeed until Congress, with the support of the next administration, removes the three national collection agencies – the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) – from the Pentagon’s command-and-control system and places them directly, like the CIA, under the control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). [complete article]

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NEWS & OPINION: CIA torture cover-up

The scapegoat
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, December 8, 2007
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As the story concerning the CIA’s decision to destroy vital evidence of its program of detainee abuse unfolds, the Bush Administration’s posture on the matter is shifting decisively. This is called “damage control.” The Administration’s initial posture was to have CIA Director Hayden put the best face on the situation and argue that everything that was done was perfectly legal and correct.

So now we come to phase two: the fall-back position. In phase two, we learn that the president and other senior figures in the Administration know nothing about it. Instead, this was all a rogue operation by a second tier leadership figure at the CIA. And indeed, by midday yesterday, White House off-the-record explainers were extremely busy pointing fingers at one man, the designated scapegoat. [complete article]

Inquiry begins into tapes’ destruction
By Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston, New York Times, December 9, 2007

The Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency’s internal watchdog on Saturday began a joint preliminary inquiry into the spy agency’s destruction of hundreds of hours of videotapes showing interrogations of top operatives of Al Qaeda.

The announcement comes amid new questions about which officials inside the C.I.A. were involved in the decision to destroy the videotapes, which showed severe interrogation methods used on two Qaeda suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

The agency operative who ordered the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the C.I.A.’s national clandestine service, known as the Directorate of Operations until 2005. On Saturday, a government official who had spoken recently with Mr. Rodriguez on the matter said that Mr. Rodriguez told him that he had received approval from lawyers inside the clandestine service to destroy the tapes. [complete article]

Hill briefed on waterboarding in 2002
By Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen, Washington Post, December 9, 2007

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange. [complete article]

Man held by CIA says he was tortured
By William Glaberson, New York Times, December 9, 2007

The first of the so-called high-value Guantánamo detainees to have seen a lawyer claims he was subjected to “state-sanctioned torture” while in secret C.I.A. prisons, and he has asked for a court order barring the government from destroying evidence of his treatment.

The request, in a filing by his lawyers, was made on Nov. 29, before officials from the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged that the agency had destroyed videotapes of interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda that current and former officials said included the use of harsh techniques.

Lawyers for the detainee, Majid Khan, a former Baltimore resident, released documents in his case on Friday. They claim he “was subjected to an aggressive C.I.A. detention and interrogation program notable for its elaborate planning and ruthless application of torture” to numerous detainees. [complete article]

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NEWS: Madhi Army makeover; Kirkuk’s Arab-Kurdish divide

Sadr militia moves to clean house
By Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times, December 7, 2007

Militia commander Abu Maha had studied his quarry carefully, watching as the man acquired fancy suits, gold watches and the street name “Master.” Now, heavily armed and dressed in an Adidas track suit, Abu Maha told his followers it was time to act against one of their comrades.

A dozen of them gripped their assault rifles and headed out. The Master, accused of sliding into immoral behavior after stoutly defending Shiite Muslims in Iraq’s sectarian violence, was about to learn that justice in the Mahdi Army could be very rough.

Fighters such as Abu Maha have taken on a new role in recent months in the militia of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. Instead of battling Sunni insurgents and U.S. troops, they are now weeding out what they consider to be black sheep within their ranks. [complete article]

As Iraqis vie for Kirkuk’s oil, Kurds become pawns
By Stephen Farrell, New York Times, December 9, 2007

Even by the skewed standards of a country where millions are homeless or in exile, the squalor of the Kirkuk soccer stadium is a startling sight.

On the outskirts of a city adjoining some of Iraq’s most lucrative oil reserves, a rivulet of urine flows past the entrance to the barren playing field.

There are no spectators, only 2,200 Kurdish squatters who have converted the dugouts, stands and parking lot into a refugee city of cinder-block hovels covered in Kurdish political graffiti, some for President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

These homeless Kurds are here not for soccer but for politics. They are reluctant players in a future referendum to decide whether oil-rich Tamim Province in the north and its capital, Kirkuk, will become part of the semiautonomous Kurdish regional government or remain under administration by Baghdad.

Under the Iraqi Constitution the referendum is due before Dec. 31. But in a nation with a famously slow political clock, one of the few things on which Kirkuk’s Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen communities agree is that yet another political deadline is about to be missed. [complete article]

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NEWS: Israel’s Vice PM: Jerusalem must be divided

Vice PM Ramon: Parts of Jerusalem must be given to Palestinians
Haaretz, December 9, 2007

Vice Premier Haim Ramon responded on Sunday to U.S. criticism of plans to build additional homes in an East Jerusalem neighborhood by saying parts of the city must be given to the Palestinians to avoid losing U.S. support.

Ramon said Israel would not give up the Jewish neighborhood of Har Homa, where the building plan announced last week sparked Palestinian anger and a warning from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that it risked harming a peace process she helped relaunch last month at the Annapolis conference.

The vice premier said, however, that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s opponents were being unrealistic in hoping for U.S. support for any peace plan that would give Israel all the present Jerusalem municipality, including all of East Jerusalem, as its capital.

Ramon told Army Radio that he is “convinced that all Jewish neighborhoods, including Har Homa, should be under Israeli sovereignty and the Arab neighborhoods should not be under Israeli sovereignty because they pose a threat to Jerusalem being the capital of Jewish Israel. [complete article]

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NEWS: Destroying the evidence

CIA was urged to keep interrogation videotapes
By Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, December 8, 2007

White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 against a plan to destroy hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda, government officials said Friday.

The chief of the agency’s clandestine service nevertheless ordered their destruction in November 2005, taking the step without notifying even the C.I.A.’s own top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, who was angry at the decision, the officials said.

The disclosures provide new details about what Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, has said was a decision “made within C.I.A. itself” to destroy the videotapes. In interviews, members of Congress and former intelligence officials also questioned some aspects of the account General Hayden provided Thursday about when Congress was notified that the tapes had been destroyed. [complete article]

Inquiry sought on CIA tapes
By Dan Eggen and Joby Warrick, Washington Post, December 8, 2007

Democratic lawmakers yesterday angrily demanded a Justice Department investigation into the CIA’s decision to destroy videotapes of harsh interrogation tactics used on two terrorism suspects.

The White House said that President Bush was unaware of the tapes or their destruction until this week, but administration sources acknowledged last night that longtime Bush aide Harriet E. Miers knew of the tapes’ existence and told CIA officials that she opposed their destruction.

The Senate intelligence committee also announced the start of its own probe into the destroyed videotapes, said Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.). [complete article]

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NEWS: More on NIE

Diving deep, unearthing a surprise
ByPeter Baker and Dafna Linzer, Washington Post, December 8, 2007

As they digested the new findings, Bush and his aides chose to focus on the part that confirmed their suspicions — that Iran previously had a secret weapons program and might still restart it. In their discussions at the White House, officials said, no one suggested Bush tone down his public rhetoric or change his policy.

Still, they understood the sensitivity of the new conclusions. At first, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, decided to keep the new findings secret, but reluctantly reversed course in a flurry of discussions last weekend out of fear of leaks and charges of a coverup, officials said. At that point, only the Israelis had gotten a heads-up. Congress, European allies and the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency were not given full briefings about the report until hours before it was released.

That irritated European allies. “The administration is going to pay a price for not allowing allies in on it at an earlier date,” said Robert J. Einhorn, a former State Department nonproliferation official. “The French had carried the administration’s water on this issue and really went out on a limb to get the European Union to adopt tough sanctions. And now the rug has been pulled out from under them.” [complete article]

Intelligence expert who rewrote book on Iran
By Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian, December 8, 2007

The intelligence came from an exotic variety of sources: there was the so-called Laptop of Death; there was the Iranian commander who mysteriously disappeared in Turkey. Also in the mix was video footage of a nuclear plant in central Iran and intercepts of Iranian telephone calls by the British listening station GCHQ.

But pivotal to the US investigation into Iran’s suspect nuclear weapons programme was the work of a little-known intelligence specialist, Thomas Fingar. He was the principal author of an intelligence report published on Monday that concluded Iran, contrary to previous US claims, had halted its covert programme four years ago and had not restarted it. Almost single-handedly he has stopped – or, at the very least, postponed – any US military action against Iran. [complete article]

Unilateral military strike still an option, senior ministers insist
By Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, December 8, 2007

Senior Israeli officials warned yesterday that they were still considering a military strike against Iran, despite a fresh US intelligence report that concluded Tehran was no longer developing nuclear weapons.

Although Israel says it wants strong diplomatic pressure put on Iran, it is reluctant to rule out the threat of a unilateral attack. Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defence minister, told Army Radio yesterday: “No option needs to be off the table.”

Avigdor Lieberman, the hard-right deputy prime minister, said Israel should be ready to act if sanctions did not work. “If they don’t, we will sit and decide whatever we have to decide,” he told the Jerusalem Post in an interview yesterday. [complete article]

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NEWS & ANALYSIS: Destroying evidence of war crimes

CIA destroyed 2 tapes showing interrogations
By Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, December 7, 2007

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said. [complete article]

Obstruction of justice at the CIA
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, December 6, 2007

Let’s first focus on this question: Why is this evidence being destroyed? The answer is painfully acknowledged. The CIA leadership and other senior administration officials are fully cognizant of the fact that the use of a number of specific practices which these tapes almost certainly document, to-wit: waterboarding, long-time standing, hypothermia, psychotropic drugs and sleep deprivation in excess of two days, are serious crimes under American law and the law of almost all nations. Consequently, those who have used them and those who have authorized their use will almost certainly ultimately face criminal prosecution at some point in the future. The Administration’s attempts to immunize the perpetrators have failed. Any purported grant of a pardon by President Bush will be legally ineffective, because Bush himself is a collaborator in the scheme. And there is no statute of limitations. Therefore the prospect of prosecution is hardly far-fetched. It is a virtual certainty. So the evidence is being destroyed precisely because it would be used as evidence of criminal acts in a prosecution of administration figures and those acting under their direction. Therefore, this is a conscious, calculated obstruction of justice. [complete article]

See also, CIA destroyed videos showing interrogations (WP), Marty Lederman – includes Hayden’s message to CIA employees (Balkinization), and This is a banana republic (Andrew Sullivan).

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ANALYSIS & OPINION: A new approach to Iran

Why containing Iran won’t work: Washington’s flawed new Middle East strategy
By Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh, Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2008

The Middle East is a region continuously divided against itself. In the 1960s, radical Arab regimes contested the legitimacy and power of traditional monarchical states. In the 1970s, Islamic fundamentalists rejected the prevailing secular order and sought to set the region on the path to God. In the 1980s, much of the Arab world supported the genocidal Saddam Hussein as he sought to displace Iran’s theocratic regime. Today, the Middle East is fracturing once more, this time along sectarian and confessional lines, with Sunnis clamoring to curb Shiite ascendance. Again and again, in the name of preserving the balance of power, U.S. policy has taken sides in the region’s conflicts, thus exacerbating tensions and widening existing cleavages. Beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict, the United States has shown limited interest in mediating conflicts, settling disputes, or bringing antagonists together. Washington sided with the conservative monarchies against Arab socialist republics, acquiesced in the brutal suppression of fundamentalist opposition by secular governments, buttressed Saudi power and the Iraqi war machine to temper Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamist rage. It is now courting Sunni regimes to align against Iran and its resurgent Shiite allies. Every time, as Washington has become mired in the Middle East’s rivalries, its goal of stabilizing the region has slipped further away.

Instead of focusing on restoring a former balance of power, the United States would be wise to aim for regional integration and foster a new framework in which all the relevant powers would have a stake in a stable status quo. The Bush administration is correct to sense that a truculent Iran poses serious challenges to U.S. concerns, but containing Iran through military deployment and antagonistic alliances simply is not a tenable strategy. Iran is not, despite common depictions, a messianic power determined to overturn the regional order in the name of Islamic militancy; it is an unexceptionally opportunistic state seeking to assert predominance in its immediate neighborhood. Thus, the task at hand for Washington is to create a situation in which Iran will find benefit in limiting its ambitions and in abiding by international norms.

Dialogue, compromise, and commerce, as difficult as they may be, are convincing means. An acknowledgment by the U.S. government that Tehran does indeed have legitimate interests and concerns in Iraq could get the two governments finally to realize that they have similar objectives: both want to preserve the territorial integrity of Iraq and prevent the civil war there from engulfing the Middle East. Resuming diplomatic and economic relations between Iran and the United States, as well as collaborating on Iraq, could also be the precursor of an eventual arrangement subjecting Iran’s nuclear program to its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. If Iran enjoyed favorable security and commercial ties with the United States and was at ease in its region, it might restrain its nuclear ambitions. [complete article]

After the Iran NIE
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, December 5, 2007

Since the NIE’s release, Bush has emphasized the passages of the report that continue to sound warning bells. But this effort will be dismissed as—and, in fact, will be—lame propaganda unless he also acknowledges, and embraces, the positive passages.

If Bush wants the rest of the world to acknowledge the caveats, he has to acknowledge—and act on—the main message. In other words, if he wants Russia, China, and the European Union to continue the diplomatic pressure on Iran, he has to offer Iran diplomatic inducements. Pressure may be needed to keep the Iranians from resuming their nuclear-weapons program. But negotiations should be started, as a reward for halting their program—and the prospect of further rewards should be held out if they unwind their program still further.

Bush should have started serious talks with Iran two years ago, for a variety of reasons. The NIE offers two additional, compelling reasons for starting them now. [complete article]

The zero-sum fiasco
By Dilip Hiro, TomDispatch, December 6, 2007

Bush’s woefully misguided invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, carried out under false pretences, has not only drained the United States treasury, but reduced Washington’s standing in the Middle East in a way not yet fully grasped by most commentators. Whereas Washington once played off Tehran against Baghdad, while involved in a superpower zero-sum game with the Soviet Union, the Bush administration is now engaged in a zero-sum game, as a virtual equal, with Iran. That is, America’s loss has become Iran’s automatic gain, and vice-versa. [complete article]

A new Chinese red line over Iran
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, December 7, 2007

The highly respected former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans has assessed after a recent visit to Tehran and meetings with top Iranian officials that the outlines of a deal are emerging and the NIE “gives us the chance to break out of this impasse [of Iran insisting on its right to enrich]”. He suggested that the “red line” should no longer be the issue of enrichment, but could be between the “civilian and military capability” of NPT signatories, and if such a new red line would hold, “it would not matter whether Iran was capable of producing its own nuclear fuel”.

Evans added, “That [red] line will hold if we can get Iran to accept a highly intrusive monitoring, verification and inspection regime” with additional safeguards, and if Iran could be persuaded to “stretch out over time the development of its enrichment capability and to have any industrial-scale activity conducted not by Iran but by an international consortium”.

Evan assesses that Iran is “capable of being persuaded” if incentives include the lifting of sanctions and normalization of relations with the US. Evans concluded: “This is a country seething with both national pride and resentment against past humiliations, and it wants to cut a regional and global figure by proving its sophisticated technological capability. One only wishes that something less sensitive than the nuclear fuel cycle had been chosen to make that point.” [complete article]

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NEWS: Republicans want intelligence to their liking

Review of Iran intelligence to be sought
By Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, December 7, 2007

Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the conclusions of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as well as the specific intelligence that went into it, according to congressional sources.

The move is the first official challenge, but it comes amid growing backlash from conservatives and neoconservatives unhappy about the assessment that Iran halted a clandestine nuclear weapons program four years ago. It reflects how quickly the NIE has become politicized, with critics even going after the analysts who wrote it, and shows a split among Republicans.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) said he plans to introduce legislation next week to establish a commission modeled on a congressionally mandated group that probed a disputed 1995 intelligence estimate on the emerging missile threat to the United States over the next 15 years. [complete article]

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NEWS & ANALYSIS: Israel and American Jewish organizations respond to NIE

Israel warns Iran to co-operate or pay price
By Con Coughlin and David Sanger, The Age, December 7, 2007

Israel has warned Iran to either co-operate with the West over its uranium enrichment program or face military action.

Ron Prosor, Israel’s newly appointed ambassador to Britain and one of his country’s leading experts on Iran’s nuclear program, said that Tehran could enrich enough uranium to make an atomic bomb by 2009.

“At the current rate of progress, Iran will reach the technical threshold for producing fissile material by 2009,” he said.

“This is a global threat and it requires a global response.

“It should be made clear that if Iran does not co-operate, then military confrontation is inevitable. It is either co-operation or confrontation.”

Mr Prosor, who served Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, as his senior adviser on Iran, said that time for resolving the nuclear issue was rapidly running out. But he was non-committal about the possibility of Israel launching military action. [complete article]

Intel bombshell sends community scrambling to hold line on Iran threat
By Marc Perelman, The Forward, December 5, 2007

American Jewish groups are scrambling to reformulate their message on Iran following the release this week of a new American intelligence report that states with “high confidence” that Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago.

In a conference call Tuesday hurriedly arranged by the umbrella body of Jewish organizations, communal leaders decided to immediately send letters to the presidential candidates from both parties, urging them to continue pushing for sanctions against Iran.

According to participants in the conference call, concern is high that the unexpected conclusions drawn in the National Intelligence Estimate not only may lead Washington to withdraw the threat of military action against Iran but may also erode the recently reached international consensus on pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. [complete article]

Israeli policy on Tehran unchanged by American assessment
By Aluf Benn, Amir Oren and Barak Ravid, Haaretz, December 7, 2007

Israel will continue reviewing the implications of the U.S. intelligence assessment that Iran has no nuclear program, and will not stop its diplomatic and public relations efforts against the Iranian bomb, government officials decided yesterday.

The statement came after a meeting called by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to discuss the significance of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate.

Olmert said at the meeting that Israel’s strict working assumption had not changed. [complete article]

Is Iran NIE a blessing in disguise for Israel?
By Trita Parsi, Antiwar, December 7, 2007

The US National Intelligence Estimate’s assertion that Iran currently does not have a nuclear weapons program has caused much frustration in Israel. Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh referred to the report as a lie at a recent breakfast in New York, and Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer reportedly “doesn’t buy” its findings.

Though the report aggravates Israel’s effort to compel Washington to pursue an increasingly harsh line against Tehran, all is not lost for Israel. In fact, despite these initial knee-jerk reactions, the NIE may very well end up being a blessing in disguise for the Jewish state by pulling Israel out of its state of paralysis vis-à-vis Iran.

Israel has long been at odds with Washington’s intelligence agencies. It started sounding the alarm bells on Iran’s nuclear program back in 1991, arguing that in the post-Cold War world, Iran and Shi’ite fundamentalism were emerging as the new strategic threat to the Middle East.

The Israeli warnings were met with great skepticism and surprise within the Beltway. After all, only a few years earlier – at a time when Iran’s revolutionary fervor was still riding high – the Israelis had gone to great lengths to bring Iran and the US back on talking terms, dismissing all notions that Iran was a threat. [complete article]

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NEWS, ANALYSIS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Missile defense against what?

Europe’s missile shield: NIE casualty?
By Mark Thompson, Time, December 6, 2007

TThat the new U.S. intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear program has put the kibosh on hawkish calls for a military response has been discussed to death, but there’s been very little focus on a second potential casualty: the U.S. plan to base ground-based missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. The plan to station interceptor missiles in Poland and tracking radars in the Czech Republic is regarded warily by citizens of those countries, and with outright hostility by the Russians who see it as aimed at blunting their own missile capability in the event of a showdown with the U.S. The plan has helped freeze U.S.-Russia ties to Cold War levels of enmity, with President Vladimir Putin just last week suspending Russia’s participation in 1990s Conventional Forces in Europe treaty.

Against the barrage of criticism from the Russians, Pentagon officials have always insisted that the purpose of the missile-defense system is to protect Europe and the U.S. from an Iranian missile attack. “It’s not the Russians that we’re worried about,” Air Force Lieutenant General Henry “Trey” Obering, chief of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, said over breakfast earlier this year. “It is the Iranian missiles that we’re worried about.” But if the best those missiles could carry is conventional explosives, the case for deploying the missile defense system in the face of the heavy diplomatic cost and financial burden ($4 billion through 2013) becomes increasingly dubious. For one thing, the Pentagon faces mounting bills of tens of billions of dollars to “reset” the U.S. military — replacing everything worn out in Afghanistan and Iraq — over the coming decade. [complete article]

Russia alleges U.S. ‘rollback’ on anti-missile plan
By Peter Finn, Washington Post, December 6, 2007

The United States has backed away from proposals it made orally in October to allay Russian fears about the deployment of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, alleged Wednesday.

Lavrov said an oral proposal to permanently station Russian officers at sites in Poland and the Czech Republic to ensure that the system’s radar would not be used to peer into Russian airspace was withdrawn when the United States submitted its proposals to Moscow in writing last month.

“We received the document, and unfortunately a serious rollback from what we agreed upon was evident,” Lavrov said at a news conference Wednesday in his first detailed comments on the U.S. written proposals. “The issue no longer concerns the permanent presence of Russian officers at possible facilities . . . in the Czech Republic and Poland.” [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — I’m not sure why I haven’t read anyone else make this observation, but there’s always seemed to me to be a glaring contradiction that the administration on the one hand asserts that Iran will never be allowed to possess nuclear weapons, while on the other hand argues to its European allies that they need a missile defense shield for protection against Iranian ballistic missiles. Either the shield was always presumed to be unnecessary or it was always presumed that efforts to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons would fail. The Pentagon’s claim that the “missile-defense program is not geared to any kind of specific defense against a specific weapon,” is baloney.

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INTERVIEW: Israel has to take the first step

“Israel has to take the first step”
Gideon Levy, Haaretz journalist, interviewed by Alessandra Cardinale, ResetDoc, December 6, 2007

A revived road-map? A photo-opportunity? Or a real possibility for peace? “The key is in Israeli hands. Israel is the occupier and Israel has to take the first step”. Gideon Levy, left-wing Israeli journalist of Haaretz, former spokesman for Shimon Peres (1978 -1982), and, according to the French newspaper Le Monde, “a thorn in Israel’s side”, does not beat around the bush when talking about the recent Annapolis peace conference. Not overly optimistic on its likely outcomes, although conceding that it offers a glimmer of hope, Levy urges both Israeli and Palestinian leaders to take a leap forward by abandoning brinkmanship and approaching peace with courage. [complete article]

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