I’m very familiar with how these procedures work. Without getting into historical minutiae the NCS is now the agency responsible for HUMINT, just as the NSA is for SIGINT and the NGA is for IMINT, etc. Each one of these collection agencies is responsible for vetting its own sources - not just the NCS (which is now a separate agency that reports to the CIA).

And the CIA is not the final gatekeeper and editor. That was true prior to 2004, but is not true anymore.

Finally, your criticisms are long on allegation and short on evidence. It seems to me you base it largely on the fact that you don’t like the conclusions and then extrapolate to find flaw in the HUMINT portion where, again, you don’t have any evidence.

No matter how verifiable intel is by another agency, the CIA gets final say. This is *not* a community process but features a ’super gatekeeper’ at the end which is *not* ODNI. The ODNI was put in to make sure that the community acted as such… this document and its process as it reports it, is contrary to those directives. Regular Agency level validation and withholding is still in-place… but the next part is no longer IC but singular Agency specific.

How much do *you* trust the CIA as editors? Because that IS new.

What gets left out is just as important as what remains, and that process can skew outlook by removing other IC work because one Agency doesn’t like the source material from another.

Because that is exactly what is happening. I don’t need to see the final 150 pages if one Agency is getting final validation as a gatekeeper and editor.

And I have no need to contact an SSO or ISSO, as I am reading only the U portion publicly released, but using my background in how the document drafting process works as I knew it vice how it is described in the NIE release. And the one part of that U release describes to me the HUMINT failure that is continuing to go on with regards to Iran and you don’t have to be read-on to know that, just an observer of the IC for the last 20 years or so. It was being talked about on newscasts back in the 1980’s. That takes no real special knowledge beyond paying attention.

Perhaps they found mind readers to figure out intentions… always a possibility!!

Great advancement in science and all that, complete with ‘Jedi mind tricks’.

The problem of ‘dot connecting’ was already difficult before ODNI was instantiated, and started to go downhill as I left the IC. This NIE tells me what the aftermath of that is. And the last two pages are pretty predictable given the lead-in.

The various collection agencies have always been gatekeepers to their own sourcing - this is hardly new. What’s different now is that the collection agencies have to tell the rest of the community details about the quality of the source which is a notable improvement. Besides, do you really want the NSA judging the validity of an INR source? Or vice-versa? Of course not.

Furthermore, I don’t see how you can have serious problems with the “outlook…construction” etc. of the NIE since you don’t (presumably) have access to the raw intelligence, nor the full 150 page classified document. If you do have such access, then perhaps I should contact your SSO….

That told me much about what the conclusions would be even before getting to the conclusions and then the startling one is not the ones that are highly touted… apparently everyone loves the obvious and are missing the part about what the IC has no handle on at all.

I have serious problems with the outlook of the document, its construction, how it was created, vetted, the institutional gatekeeper involved and the final resulting analysis because of those things. But then I see that beauracracy influences analysis… that is how the IC works, as does the rest of the government. Still pretty amazing that they let such a large problem slip out into the unclassified portion.

The opinions truly run the gambit over this latest bit of released (preemptively leaked?) intelligence. Enjoy.
The Corner on National Review Online - Bush and the NIE   [Byron York]

Iran’s Nuke Program Ended In 2003? - Right Wing News
Townhall…

With regard to Iran making enrichment a “national sovereignty issue” - that is half the story.

The other half is that Iran believes that once it masters the fuel cycle and creates “events on the ground” that cannot be turned back, then the West and international community will be forced to deal with Iran and accept reality. For example, Hassan Rowhani, who became Iran’s nuclear negotiator in 2003, said in 2004:

As for the question of what we can do now that they all disagree with our having the fuel cycle, I submit to you that we require an opportunity, time to be able to act on our capability in this area. That is, if one day we are able to complete the fuel cycle and the world sees that it has no choice, that we do possess the technology, then the situation will be different. The world did not want Pakistan to have an atomic bomb or Brazil to have the fuel cycle, but Pakistan built its bomb and Brazil has its fuel cycle, and the world started to work with them. Our problem is that we have not achieved either one, but we are standing at the threshold. As for building the atomic bomb, we never wanted to move in that direction and we have not yet completely developed our fuel cycle capability. This also happens to be our main problem.

When combined with the administration’s sweetheart nuclear deal with India (one that really plunges a dagger into the heart of nonproliferation) and most recently North Korea, Iran’s thinking here is probably justified. Here’s how Matthew Bunn, an analyst at Harvard’s Belfer Center puts it:

…some of my Iranian colleagues—I’ve been making an effort to try to understand what is going on in Tehran, although with limited success—have told me that in Tehran the nuclear hardliners are pointing to India and saying basically, look what happened to them, they tested, everybody in the whole world sanctioned them, and then six months later Clinton was crawling back and saying, please be our friend, et cetera. Now, they’re getting this nuclear deal. The hardliners are using that as an argument that while there may be sanctions now, if we just move forward, eventually the world will roll over and acquiesce to what we’re doing. That’s a plausible argument. That’s not obvious to me that they’re wrong given the huge pool of oil and gas that Iran is sitting on.

All of this ties in rather nicely with the recent NIE. At this point I don’t believe Iran can be deterred from continuing its work on the fuel cycle - I think that’s something we’ll likely have to learn to live with.

The key is how to prevent Iran from restarting its weapons program - a difficult task to be sure….