11/09/07 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

All right, folks, welcome to Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest today is the great investigative reporter and independent historian Gareth Porter.
You can find what he writes at antiwar.com/porter, also at the American Prospect, the Huffington Post, IPS News.
Thanks a lot for coming back on the show today, Gareth.
Thanks again for having me, Scott.
Well, you're the top headline today on antiwar.com.
Cheney tried to stifle dissent in Iran NIE.
So, real quick, Gareth, tell us what exactly is an NIE?
That's the National Intelligence Estimate, which is a coordinated effort by all 16 intelligence agencies of the United States under the Director of National Intelligence to coordinate a judgment or a set of judgments about a particular country or issue.
Okay, so basically, it's not just the CIA comes out with this report.
It's the head of all the different intelligence agencies sit around a table and hash out what they're all willing to put their names on.
Is that it?
Well, I think that's very roughly correct.
That is to say that there's the negotiation that goes on at higher levels.
But obviously, each agency has to negotiate with its own analysts as well.
The analysts who are actually responsible for the analytical judgments are the ones who, in the end, have to be satisfied that the agreed language is what represents their true judgments.
So that's part of the process as well.
Okay, and now the story is here, according to your article, that the National Intelligence Council has produced an NIE on the nation's state of Iran, and yet somehow it's been withheld or suppressed for more than a year.
What's going on?
Well, it looks very much like this is, in some ways, a replay of the process of coming to the 2002 NIE on Iraq, which, of course, as we now know, was very much a divided estimate, which is to say that different agencies came out with different views on specific issues having to do with the WMD issue on Iraq.
That appears to be the case here on Iran as well, that there are division splits within the intelligence community.
And at this moment, it's impossible to be more precise about that in terms of which agency is taking which position, because my sources could not be more precise about that without basically giving away their own sources within the intelligence community.
But nevertheless, we know that the key issues are, first of all, the Iranian nuclear program and how urgent a threat it represents, and secondly, the question of Iranian assistance to military assistance to Shiites in Iraq.
And those are issues which are contested.
There are analysts, according to the sources that I quote, including one on the record, Philip Giraldi, of course, who is a contributor to antiwar.com, saying that there are analysts within the intelligence community who are supporting basically the line that Cheney very much wants to see come out of this estimate on both those issues, particularly the Iranian nuclear program.
And there are analysts who are holding out, who are saying, we're not going to go along with the estimate or the judgment that the Iranian nuclear program is a short-term threat.
And indeed, they're holding out for more or less the same judgment as was made in the previous NIA in 2005, which is that at the very earliest, Iran would not have the capability to manufacture a nuclear weapon before 2010, or more likely before 2015.
Which happens to be exactly what the International Atomic Energy Agency is saying as well.
Well, that's right.
I think that is pretty much a standard view than most, certainly the CIA.
I think the DIA, according to some press reporting, has been more willing to go along with the Cheney line, both on the nuclear issue and particularly on the Iranian role in Iraq as well.
Well, you know, it was a really big deal when John Negroponte, who had been ambassador to the United Nations, ambassador to Iraq, and then was the National Intelligence Director, he left that job to become number two to Condi Rice over at the State Department.
And that was kind of a big deal.
And you say in your article here that one of the reasons that that happened was because of him butting heads with Dick Cheney over Iran's nuclear program.
Is that it?
Right.
It's not the only reason.
Clearly, there are other differences between Negroponte and Cheney as well.
But certainly, this one was a big one and perhaps the biggest one.
I think, by all accounts, Cheney's, you know, obsession in the past year has been to ramp up the U.S., the aggressiveness of U.S. policy toward Iran and to try to maneuver for a position in which he could advocate an actual military strike of some sort against Iran.
And Negroponte has not been willing to roll over for Cheney.
And he has, in fact, stood up for the 2005 NIE, which Cheney and the neoconservatives disliked very strongly because it did say that Iran would not be able to have a nuclear capability, nuclear weapons capability, for five to ten years.
So there was a lot of tension around that.
And then, you know, the new NIE process began, and Cheney was not getting the revision of the 2005 estimate that he wanted.
And so Negroponte had to go.
And I think it's clear that his replacement, Mike McConnell, was brought in personally by Cheney with particularly the thought in mind that he would be more cooperative on getting an NIE that is clean in the sense that it does not have the dissenting views that could cause political problems for Cheney in the future as they go into 2008 trying to push for, as he and his allies go into 2008, trying to push for a military move on Iran.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter from IPS News.
And yesterday on the show, Gareth, we did a review of all the most important articles on the subject of America's march to war with Iran.
And, of course, quite a few of those articles were yours.
And one of the more important ones, I think, was military resistance forced shift on Iran's strike.
The chiefs did not want to bomb the nuclear program.
So according to your article, they came up with a legal pretext around that in trying to accuse the Iranians of being behind everything that's gone wrong for America in Iraq.
And that basically they can use some section of the UN Charter to claim self-defense if they can only frame up the Iranians for blowing up some Americans in Iraq.
Is that basically the point there?
Well, that appears to have been a new sort of thought that was brought into the public declaratory policy of the administration in late 2006 and early 2007.
As a result of this toughening of the policy, they were already intending as of the fall of 2006 to go after Iranian officials or people they could accuse of being Iranian could force people in Iraq.
Well, now, what does this suppressed national intelligence estimate say about that?
Well, we don't know what it says about it at this moment.
But what we do know is that there are people on both sides of this issue whose views are being represented in the NIE.In other words, there are analysts who are saying, Cheney wants them to say, which is roughly that Iran has indeed been providing EFPs, explosively formed penetrators, and other weapons to Shiite militias, the Mahdi Army essentially, in Iraq.
And there are those analysts who are saying, no, there is not confirming evidence for that proposition.
Well, one of the people who I quote, without naming him, said, look, there are a lot of young analysts in the intelligence community who are conservative, who are not ready to buck the system, and who are ready to give the administration, meaning the Cheney line, for the benefit of the doubt.
You know, that becomes the kind of default position in the process.
See, that's what I would expect, is that the basic line is what Cheney wants them to say, and this is really a fight over footnotes.
Are the dissenters going to be able to say at the bottom of the page, hey, hey, I don't agree with this?
Well, it's not clear exactly how the dissenting views from the position that Cheney favors would be reflected in an NIE.
Obviously, footnotes is one way that it's done, but it can also be reflected that there is a split in the intelligence community.
And I have a feeling, from what I have heard, what I've been told, that it's the latter that is the troublesome aspect of this NIE from Cheney's point of view, that in fact the draft NIE that he refused to circulate for the past year, and demanded that it be revised more than once, and I'm told that three different times, actually does reflect, not just in footnotes, but in the text itself, a divided intelligence community.
Well, very interesting, and I hate to draw conclusions.
Basically, just from that, there's a split, but I guess I would have to default with the people who are refusing to go along with Cheney's view are the ones telling the truth, and the fact that there's even really a fight going on in there reveals that the data is ambiguous enough that surely you couldn't base a war off of it.
Well, one would think that that would be very unwise, and I think what we have to understand is that the intelligence process, like everything else, is a reflection of power relations.
You know, as you say, it's the position of those who have the power in the government that tends to be the default position, unless the analysts themselves are very sure of themselves, unless they have a very strong position based on facts to defend an alternative, and unless they have some protection within the intelligence community.
And those questions, those conditions for dissent within the intelligence community are sometimes threatened by various factors, and Cheney's aggressiveness, the aggressiveness of the neoconservatives since the Bush administration came into power, is a factor that really does threaten those conditions for maintaining an honest set of intelligence judgments on these issues.
All right, thank you very much, everybody.
Gareth Porter from IPS News, The American Prospect, The Huffington Post, Antiwar.com, and Independent Historian, thank you very much for your time today, sir.
Thanks so much, Scott.