[NYTr] "Laptop of Death" - Revising the NIE on Iran

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

IPS - Dec 8, 2007
http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=40397

"Laptop of Death": Revising the NIE on Iran

Analysis by Khody Akhavi

WASHINGTON, Dec 8 (IPS) - Nearly one week after a U.S. intelligence
report revealed that Iran halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003,
the sabre-rattling inside the Washington Beltway appears to have
receded for the moment, and with it, the George W. Bush
administration's strongest pretext for a military confrontation with
Iran. The judgments of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
contradicted findings in a similar 2005 report, which assessed that
Iran was 10 years away from developing nuclear weapons. That report --
the first major review since 2001 of what is known and what is unknown
about Iran -- also said Iran's military was conducting clandestine
nuclear work, and that if "left to its own devices, Iran is determined
to develop nuclear weapons."

Critics of President Bush's Iran policy believe that the new
intelligence estimate provides the rationale for a shift in the
administration's stance on Tehran, away from confrontation and towards
engagement.

The estimate did not portray Iran as a rogue ideological state
zealously questing for nuclear weapons, as many neo-conservatives have
fiercely argued, but rather a rational political actor whose "decisions
are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon
irrespective of the political, economic and military costs."

But the competition of duelling intelligence estimates is already
underway, as is a battle for the integrity of the U.S. intelligence
community, which has been harshly criticised for its failure to
properly assess the WMD threat -- or the lack thereof -- in the lead-up
to the Iraq War.

Former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet called the
2002 NIE about Iraq's weapons programmes "one of the lowest moments of
my seven-year tenure". The Iraq report relied heavily on information
provided by a source called "Curveball," an Iraqi chemical engineer
later revealed as Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who had fed false information to
German intelligence in exchange for asylum protection for him and his
family. Germany did not trust him, but Alwan's claims eventually made
it to Washington.

Critics argue that intelligence was also manipulated by policy-makers
within the Bush administration to justify an U.S.-led invasion, and
that neo-conservatives are still trying to exert political control over
the intelligence process.

"The last thing we need is more political input into intelligence
matters. The facts are the facts, and it's time conservatives began to
deal with the facts on the ground," said Jon Wolfsthal, a senior fellow
at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, responding to
the attempts to undermine the NIE's findings.

"The days of Doug Feith and Steve Cambone creating intelligence to suit
their ideology are thankfully behind us," he said.

Meanwhile, neo-conservatives and former Bush officials have launched a
ferocious counterattack on the NIE, and more pointedly at its authors
-- the intelligence officers whose presumable goal is to undermine the
Bush policy agenda.

"I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having
been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam
had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to
counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view ... that
Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons," wrote Norman
Podhoretz in the right-wing Commentary Magazine.

"But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is the intelligence
community, which has for so many years now been leaking material
calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again."

In the opinion pages of the Washington Post, former U.S. envoy to the
United Nations John R. Bolton was more pointed, accusing the NEI of
being polluted by "refugees from the State Department" who were brought
into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national
intelligence, a position created in the response to the Sep. 11
Commission's assessments on U.S. intelligence failures. Bolton also
criticised the intelligence community for engaging in "policy
formulation" rather than "intelligence analysis," and said that the new
estimate was based on a bias given to new piece of information that
could not decisively negate all previous knowledge.

"It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can
conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known
information," said Bolton. "Yet the bias toward the new appears to have
exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.

Some experts have suggested that the new information involved the
interception of a conversation between top Iranian military officials
who were bitter over the Iranian leadership's decision to halt its
weapons programme.

More importantly, the U.S. intelligence community's belief that Iran
was pursuing a covert nuclear weapons programme up until 2003 was
largely based on information contained in a laptop computer belonging
to an Iranian engineer, said Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the
non-proliferation Initiative at the Washington-based New America
Foundation think-tank.

Lewis said that media outlets erroneously reported that the laptop,
which the U.S. obtained in 2004 and which contained documents
describing two Iranian nuclear programmes, termed L-101 and L-102 by
the Iranians, directly related to weapons work. He said it more
specifically referred to modifications to a missile that would
ostensibly carry a nuclear warhead.

"A lot of folks, myself included, have wondered about the reliability
of the information. We've even taken to calling it the 'laptop of
death'," he said. But it was the crude manner in which the documents
were constructed that gave Lewis pause.

"What led many of us to have serious doubts about it was how utterly
unconnected from reality some of the information seemed. Some of the
reports indicated that some of the view graphs were done in Powerpoint,
which suggested to me that the programme was not terribly
sophisticated," he said.

The report also seems to vindicate the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the
International Atomic Energy Agency, but the NIE has been rejected by
Israel, which claims that Iranian nuclear weapons programme is still
running. And it appears that for the Bush White House, even facts will
not get in the way of policy. "We're dealing with a country that is
still enriching uranium and remains a leading state sponsor of
terrorism. That is a cause of great concern to the United States," said
Vice President Dick Cheney in remarks delivered Friday at the National
World War I Museum. "Not everyone understands the threat of nuclear
proliferation in Iran or elsewhere but we and our allies do understand
the threat and we have a duty to prevent it," he said. Earlier in the
week, Cheney did express support for the estimate, saying that he had
no reason to question "what the community has produced, with respect to
the NIE on Iran".

(END/2007)