Right Wing Nut House

I detailed my major concerns with Mike Huckabee in this post last week, dealing exclusively with the former Arkansas governor’s decidedly unconservative fiscal record.

But frankly, to a large swath of GOP voters on the Christian right, the Huckster could be the second coming of Bill Clinton but as long as all of his religious “I’s” are dotted and “T’s” crossed, he’s their guy.

Nevertheless, the Club for Growth is planning to launch a series of ads to run in Iowa and New Hampshire (as well as nationally on Fox News) that urge viewers to ask Mike Huckabee about his tax record.

Needless to say, Mr. Huckabee has a lot of explaining to do:

To emphasize Mike Huckabee’s eager support for tax increases, the ad excerpts a 2003 clip of Mike Huckabee rattling off a list of tax increases he deems acceptable. While the former governor will argue that he had no choice and was bound by state law to balance the budget, the 2003 clip is emblematic of Huckabee’s ten-year tenure in which raising taxes was his first resort. Many cities and states have balanced budget laws like Arkansas, but not all governors and mayors embrace higher taxes the way Mike Huckabee did. Some actually cut government spending and waste in order to make ends meet. But under Mike Huckabee’s tenure, the average Arkansas tax burden increased 47%. Mike Huckabee’s support for tax hikes include:

Just to let you know, Huckabee has also expressed support for an internet sales tax that would make shopping online an adventure.

I don’t believe The Huck is a closet liberal or anything. He’s just stupid:

Then tell me, what does he mean here when he asserts that Bush had the new NIE “for four years”? The whole point of the NIE is that it reversed the previous NIE from 2005 that claimed Iran had a covert weapons program. The one that just came out is brand new, compiled over the last year or so and reportedly reliant on intel that was recently obtained. He didn’t misspeak, either; he hinted that the report was four years old in an interview on MSNBC this morning too.

Between this and the “INS” gaffe yesterday, if he doesn’t watch out the narrative’s going to shift from Dumond, immigration, and religion to whether this guy has even a basic sense of what he’s talking about.

The “INS gaffe” was an eye popper. In a position paper he released on immigration, Huckabee (or some amatuer hour staffer who wrote it) referred to the “Immigration and Naturalization Service,” an agency that when folded into DHS in 2003 became the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services).

Holy Christ! Doesn’t anyone vet these things before releasing them to the press?

And not only did Huckabee accuse Bush of having the NIE on Iran for four years, when questioned about the document on Tuesday, almost 24 hours after it became available, Huckabee hadn’t even heard about it.

Scared yet? Let’s go to Huckabee channelling Pat Robertson. The TV preacher, as I’m sure you know, conducts regular conversations with the Almighty about all sorts of things. Here’s Huckabee on his recent surge in the polls:

There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people. (Applause) That’s the only way that our campaign can be doing what it’s doing. And I’m not being facetious nor am I trying to be trite. There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much, and it has. And it defies all explanation, it has confounded the pundits. And I’m enjoying every minute of them trying to figure it out, and until they look at it, from a, just experience beyond human, they’ll never figure it out.

I want to make it clear I am not complaining that the guy has faith. I think that’s just fine.

Just don’t expect me to support someone for president who explains his rise in the polls by intimating that God is on his side.

Are we really going to hand the nomination to this neophyte? This man whose knowledge of foreign and defense policy is deficient, whose grasp of large issues like immigration questionable?

And we haven’t even gotten to the “electability” issue. This guy is a walking disaster for the Republican party. In a general election against Hillary Clinton he will be lucky to take 8 states - all in the south - and make the GOP debacle of 1964 look like a walk in the park.

So go ahead, indulge yourselves my Christian right friends. Nominate the man who can quote parables from the bible but doesn’t know that the INS isn’t in business anymore. Elevate a man who is “right” on all your issues but is as unschooled in foreign policy as George Bush was when he took office in 2001. Except we weren’t at war then and didn’t think it necessary to have a president who had a broad, adult, outlook on the world.

What do you think now?

Nominate Huckabee and I won’t be the only one shopping my vote somewhere else next November.

I see from Memorandum that the only people writing about this at the moment are on the left. I sincerely hope that changes because this is a very important story and I would hate to think that a sense of partisanship would intrude on what is a probable violation of the law.

There may be good reason to destroy DVD’s of interrogations. But not when they have probative value in a potential court case nor when they are destroyed to cover up wrong doing by employees of the government:

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

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.

This is bad enough. But what makes this a budding scandal for the CIA is that both the 9/11 Commission and attorneys for Zacarias Moussaoui specifically requested such evidence and the CIA denied they had it:

The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission, which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.

C.I.A. lawyers told federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge in the case. It was unclear whether the judge had explicitly sought the videotape depicting the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah.

Granted the judge may not have asked for the specific tapes nor did the 9/11 Commission request anything specific. But if the CIA is going to hang its hat on that defense, damn them. Their failure to turn over potential exculpatory evidence may open an avenue of appeal for Zacarias Moussaoui to at least grant him a new trial. And they impeded the 9/11 investigation by failing to fully cooperate with the Commission’s requests for information.

It is against American law to torture prisoners - even terrorists. And American law’s definition of torture mirrors that of the definition given by the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention prohibits the kind of “severe interrogation techniques” that were used on Zubaydah. It’s not a question of whether waterboarding isn’t really “torture” because our special forces guys go through it as part of their training. Or other “stress techniques” aren’t really torture because they leave no marks or don’t really distress the prisoner. The law is the law and these special interrogation techniques are in violation of the Geneva Convention and hence, American law.

If one plus one still equals two, that would mean that the officials who were concerned that the tapes “could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy” and went ahead and destroyed them anyway are up for obstruction charges.

We can argue - and I have in the past on this site - that the Geneva Convention is ridiculously out of date, moldy in its thinking and laughably naive about men at war and the exigencies of the times. And the fact that we and other western countries are the only ones who even make an attempt to conduct ourselves by its rules is patently unfair and revealing of a sickening double standard abroad in the world.

But until and unless it is amended, those officials who authorized the interrogations and who carried them out could be in violation of the law and subject to prosecution. Destroying the tapes therefore is destroying potential evidence in a criminal trial.

I don’t write much about the torture issue anymore because it sickens me to have my friends on the right trying to excuse it and it nauseates me when the left moralizes about it. It is wrong and will come back to haunt us. Not because, as some argue, that it puts our own soldiers in danger. That argument flies in the face of history. We have never fought a war where the enemy we were fighting followed the Geneva Convention. In fact, most of the enemies we have fought have been flagrant violators of human decency in their treatment of prisoners much less paying any attention to the strictures in the GC.

We should not torture because of who we are not because of what the Geneva Convention says, or the left says, or the hypocritical third world moralists say. It is wrong for Americans to do it. And yes, waterboarding is torture. Putting a prisoner in stress positions is torture. Sleep deprivation is torture.

Forget the hysterics from our political opponents and examine the issue not as a partisan but as question of simple human decency. If we Americans have lost that - if we’ve forgotten that we hold ourselves to a higher standard than the brutes we are fighting and their allies in the hypocritical third world, then we will have lost a very important component of what makes us an exceptional nation.

I don’t know if we have the courage to face this issue and bring the violators to some kind of justice. I totally reject the idea of allowing any kind of foreign tribunal to judge Americans for the simple reason I wouldn’t trust them to be fair and objective, anti-Americanism being a dominant ideology in much of the world where the efficacy of such tribunals is acknowledged. And facing the music on torture opens a chasm beneath our feet in that the techniques used on these prisoners were approved at the highest levels of the American government. The idea that these officials will walk away scott free is troubling. But if you put Bush on trial, what does that do as far as limiting the options of his successors? And is it the kind of precedent we really want to set?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. And those on the left, blinded by their unreasoning hatred of this president, are not the ones to judge the best course of action. But there clearly must be some kind of accounting for what has been done in our name. How that plays out will say a lot about us as a nation that purports to stand for the best in humanity and not the worst.

UPDATE

More from the Times here.

And The Blotter is reporting that DCIA Hayden issued a statement to CIA employees before the Times article broke, giving a rather disingenuous reason for the destruction of the tapes:

CIA Director Mike Hayden sent a message to CIA employees today saying “the press has learned” that the CIA videotaped interrogations in 2002 and that the tapes were subsequently destroyed in 2005. The decision to destroy the tapes was made by the CIA, but he says the leaders of the congressional intelligence committees knew about the tapes and the decision to destroy them.

Hayden offers an explanation for why the tapes were destroyed — “no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquiries” and offers another defense of the interrogation techniques used by the CIA.

John Sifton, a human rights attorney who is active in cases involving the CIA’s secret prison program, said today that the destruction of the tapes is a scandal.

“This is a major piece of the mosaic of evidence, and now it’s gone,” said Sifton. “They should be ashamed of themselves.”

If the CIA didn’t have a history of stiffing Congressional Committees, judicial proceedings, and special tribunals like the Warren Commission, we might be more inclined to believe General Hayden.

But it is ridiculous for Hayden to say that the decision to destroy them was made in a political vacuum. As the Times article points out, the tapes were destroyed at the height of Congressional interest in the CIA’s interrogation techniques. To then go ahead and destroy a tape that may have been instructive of how the CIA carried out interrogations would seem to infer cover-up rather than some kind of standard operating procedure.

That is, unless you trust what Hayden and others are saying about the subject. And frankly, they lost the right to get the benefit of the doubt long ago.

UPDATE: 12/7:

Jamses Joyner also sees obstruction of justice as a problem for those who ordered the tapes destroyed. He also points out that there was Congressional oversight of a sort in that the Chairmen and Vice Chairs of the House and Senate Intel Committees were informed of the plan to destroy the tapes. (No mention of informing the Speaker and Minority Leader in the House and the Majority/Minority Leader in the Senate which would also be the custom in these cases of limited notification.)

James pretty much takes Hayden at his word as far as why the tapes were destroyed but points out the discrepancies in his explanation. Any way you slice it, someone needs to be held accountable for the tape’s destruction.

The votes are in from this week’s Watchers Council and the winner in the Council category is yours truly for my post “Buchanan’s New Book: “Prepare Ye for the End.” Finishing a close second was “The Visual Imagery Society” by The Glittering Eye.

Finishing on top in the Non Council category was “Have Our Copperheads Found Their McClellan in Retired LTG General Sanchez?” by Council newbie Wolf Howling as GW joins the gang this week.

If you’d like to participate in the Watchers Council vote, go here and follow instructions.

Lost in all the back and forth about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iranian nukes is the shocking fact that such a document saw the light of day to begin with.

Is there any other nation on earth - perhaps in world history - that would share the deepest secrets of its intelligence gathering with its own citizens and the citizens of the world? And even more remarkable is the fact that by releasing this particular NIE, the government itself is forced to acknowledge an error in what it previously believed about an adversary - if not an outright humiliation certainly an embarrassment that every other government I can think of would avoid at all costs.

There are examples of democracies that have investigated their government’s actions and publicized wrongdoing or embarrassing incidents. But those revelations were dragged out the government as a result of official inquiries. What makes this situation different is that the release of the NIE was done voluntarily and with full recognition of the consequences.

Now before everyone starts ripping flesh off my bones for being a naive, jingoing, nationalistic, incurable romantic about America allow me to acknowledge that just about every reason you can give for why the NIE was released is probably valid. I hold no illusions that the government didn’t make the NIE available because it was bound to come out anyway. And when I say that the release was “voluntary” I don’t mean to imply that on a superficial level, the prospect that the report would be leaked didn’t play a role in the NIE’s release.

But in the end, for whatever reason, this is an extraordinary turn of events. The government could have refused to release the findings and then stonewalled when the document was leaked. Judging by the reaction on the right (and the dismissal of the key findings by the Israelis), the Administration may very well have been able to get away with not commenting on the report at all. To release it - reluctantly and trying to put the best face on the findings as they did - doesn’t obviate the fact that in some very important ways, the act of allowing the public to view the most secret deliberations of our government validates American democracy.

We live in a time when secrecy in government threatens our basic liberties as well as the concept of “open government” on which our democracy rests. This Administration has classified more documents already than any other in American history and has been more secretive in its deliberations than any other in memory. While recognizing that much of what our intelligence agencies do must necessarily remain hidden in order to protect the methods with which that intel is gathered as well as the lives of people gathering it, we as a people must demand that our leaders be as accountable for their actions as our national safety permits.

While recognizing this danger, we can celebrate when the exceptional nature of American democracy reveals itself. With great reluctance, the Bush Administration took a tiny step toward a more open government. I have no illusions that this will continue nor do I believe it redeems the Administration for the previous 7 years of obsessive, over the top secrecy.

But taken as a separate event, the release of this document should elicit feelings of pride that the core beliefs we hold about this country can be confirmed in such a public and remarkable way.

Above and beyond the questions about the reasons key judgments on the Iranian nuclear program were altered so dramatically over the course of just two years, the biggest puzzle of all is why the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was released in the first place.

Aside from initiating a political earthquake here at home, the revelation that Iran stopped working on its nuclear program in the fall of 2003 and that there is no evidence they have started it up again is causing a sea change in opinion overseas as well.

Almost everyone now agrees that bombing Iran is off the table - if it hadn’t been removed previously. The President’s jawboning on the issue has recently been less about American options and placed more in the context of why the world needed to act to prevent an Iranian bomb. Judging by their success in getting two rounds of sanctions passed by the Security Council, this seemed to be a winning strategy. As recently as 48 hours ago, China had agreed to the outlines of another round of sanctions against the Iranian regime.

But now, the support for another blast of sanctions directed against Iran seems to be slipping away. Russia is standing firm against more restrictions and China seems to be reconsidering as well:

“Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov indicated that the U.S. acknowledgment that Iran halted a suspected nuclear weapons bid in 2003 undermined Washington’s push for a new set of U.N. sanctions.

We will assess the situation regarding a new U.N. Security Council resolution taking into account all these facts, including the U.S. confirmation that it has no information about the existence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran,” he said.

Russia and China, another veto-wielding council member, have grudgingly approved two sets of limited U.N. sanctions against Iran over its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment. But the Kremlin has bristled at the U.S. push for tougher measures, saying they would only widen the rift.

China had said Tuesday the U.S. report raised second thoughts about new sanctions.

This would be a huge blow to our Iran strategy. The fact is, the Security Council placed these sanctions on Iran in the first place not because they were building a bomb but because they defied the Council’s order that they stop enriching uranium and cooperate 100% with he IAEA in assessing how “peaceful” was their program. Even the mild mannered bureaucrats at the IAEA are not satisfied with Iran’s performance in this regard:

“To be frank, we are more skeptical,” a senior official close to the agency (IAEA) said. “We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.”

The official called the American assertion that Iran had “halted” its weapons program in 2003 “somewhat surprising.”

IAEA Chief Mohamed ElBaradei has constantly urged Iran to be more transparent in divulging information about their program. It hasn’t worked to date which is why ElBaradei has reluctantly gone along with the sanctions.

But losing ElBaradei would be the ballgame as far as sanctions by the Security Council is concerned. And right now, it doesn’t look good:

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s public stance, and the main message of Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general, was to praise the new finding as proof that his agency had been right in its analysis.

The American assessment “tallies with the agency’s consistent statements over the last few years that — although Iran still needs to clarify some important aspects of its past and present nuclear activities — the agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran,” Dr. ElBaradei said in a statement.

He said the American intelligence assessment “should help to defuse the current crisis.”

One reading of that could be “no crisis, no sanctions.” And if ElBaradei would abandon his support for sanctions, it is likely that the entire regime would collapse and all our hard work in getting the cooperation of Russia and China would have been for naught.

This begs my original question; if all this fallout from the NIE could be foreseen, why release it in the first place?

For the answer, ideology and loyalty colors most analyses. The left believes Bush was forced to release the report due to its explosive nature. Indeed, it is likely that if the President had tried to sit on the report, someone associated with the loose cabal of intelligence officers and analysts who have been leaking damaging information for years - both to point the finger at some administration mistake or to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the difficulties we’ve had in Iraq and elsewhere - would have surely passed the NIE on to one of their friends in the national security press.

Or perhaps Bush was persuaded by Congress to release the unclassified version thinking it likely that the report would see the light of day that way. Either way, the NIE would have hit the public in the worst possible light - spun by hostile legislators, spooks and journalists. Rather than create a firestorm of controversy, he allowed the redacted version to be released with his blessing.

All of this may be true. But I think there was another, more compelling reason why Bush gave the go ahead to release the report. He wanted to undercut the neo-conservatives both in and out of his administration who have become a lead weight around his presidency for at least the last 3 years.

For the last year, ever since Donald Rumsfeld left the Administration, the President has slowly altered his course in foreign affairs, taking a more traditional approach to world problems. He has not only changed military strategy in Iraq but has initiated diplomatic moves resulting in meetings with both Syrian and Iranian officials. He has become more engaged in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, culminating in the meeting in Annapolis last week where both sides agreed to resume peace talks. He has shown more willingness to work with the United Nations on a variety of issues not limited to Iran including problems in Lebanon and Africa. Bush has even relented slightly on issues relating to climate change in that he is now at least willing to discuss the problem.

To say that these moves would have been unthinkable during the first 4 years of the Bush presidency would be an overstatement. But there is no doubt that there has been a shift in Administration strategy away from unilateralism and toward engagement. And each of these small steps toward traditionalism has brought criticism and resistance from the clique in the Administration variously known as the neo-conservatives or the Cheney faction.

Much ink has been spilled trying to explain the relationship between George Bush and his Vice President. The simple minded portray Cheney as a puppeteer pulling the President’s strings. Others have Cheney as a totally independent force riding roughshod over the executive branch to get his way with Bush standing by helplessly unable to stop him.

Bush himself has a hard time describing his working relationship with Cheney. Here he is trying to talk about it in a special on Fox News:

Q: “Is he a man of few words inside the White House? What’s his style when you meet?”

Bush: “I think I’m wiser than that — than to be pigeonholed or, you know, to get cornered by a wily advisor. Look, that’s not the way it works. Dick Cheney walks in and I say, ‘What’s your advice on this subject?’ And he gives it to me and I make up my mind based upon a variety of factors including the advice of key advisors and he is one of them.”

Outsiders see something different. David Gergen In an interview for the PBS Frontline documentary Cheney’s Law:

I think this particular vice president has had an enormous amount of persuasion with this president. I think he’s listened to him more closely than anybody else, especially in those early years. But still at the end of the day it’s the president who’s made the calls, and I think this penchant for secrecy and large executive power that Dick Cheney has been pushing, I think it’s something the president has bought into. Did Cheney help to persuade him? Absolutely. But is the president now persuaded? Absolutely. I think he’s now a devotee of expanded executive power.

Not Svengali or Machievelli but more a mentor perhaps. And as the years have gone by and the Administration’s plans have come a cropper in many places but especially Iraq, there must have been a time when Bush realized that relying on his own instincts rather than on the Vice President’s advice served him just as well.

With the hiring of Robert Gates as defense secretary and the exiting of most of the neo-conservatives from the Pentagon that Rumsfeld relied on for support, Cheney’s influence waned. And Condi Rice’s ascension to Secretary of State signalled a more pragmatic, less ideological approach in foreign policy, sidelining many of Cheney’s allies at Foggy Bottom.

It would be ridiculous to say that Bush woke up one day and realized that he was his own man and that he didn’t need or want to rely on the Cheney faction to play such a large role in making policy any longer. But there is no doubt a metamorphosis has taken place in the last year and that the President has been charting a course more independent of his Vice President’s ideas on foreign and defense policy. This is not to say that Cheney is no longer a valued advisor or that he has no power to influence the president or policy. But as the sands of time run out on the Administration, Cheney’s clout has lessened.

Confronted with a complete change in policy on Iran necessitated by the findings in the NIE, Bush has taken the opportunity to embrace the shift, placing it in the context of his successful UN sanctions policy and urging the world to keep the pressure on the Iranians.

The disappointment in the writings of many neoconservatives evident by the dark intimations of conspiracy in the NIE findings against the president’s policies shows how far apart the President and the neocons have grown. Where Bush apparently sees the NIE as a challenge to shift American policy and carry the world along with him, the neocons see dark betrayal.

Not quite a final break but certainly the President is striking out in a direction the neocons are extremely reluctant to follow. It should be interesting to watch the Administration over the next few months to see just where this newfound independence leads.

Joim ne today from 3:00 - 4:00 PM Central time for the Rick Moran Show on Blogt Talk Radio.

Today, my special guest is Michael Van Der Galien of The Van Der Galien Gazette. Michael is a citizen of Holland, a grad student in American studies, and an Ameriophile of the first order. We’ll talk about Russian elections, the EU, the future of the Europe and America, and much more.

If you want to stream the broadcast, click the icon below.

If you want to call in to the show, the number is (718) 664-9764.

A podcast of the show will be available around 15 minutes after it concludes.

UPDATE

Very interesting discussion. Michael has a perspective you definitely don’t get from any American media on a variety of topics.

You can stream the broadcast by clicking on the player below:

You can download the podcast by going here.

According to the Washington Post, a footnote in the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran which reports a halt in Iranian nuclear bomb building in 2003, shows that the main conclusions in the document came about as a result of two crucial pieces of intelligence; the now famous design for a bomb casing found in an Iranian document dump to the International Atomic Energy Agency back in 2004 and SIGINT from last summer involving conversations between high ranking Iranian generals that clearly indicated the program had been halted:

Senior officials said the latest conclusions grew out of a stream of information, beginning with a set of Iranian drawings obtained in 2004 and ending with the intercepted calls between Iranian military commanders, that steadily chipped away at the earlier assessment.

In one intercept, a senior Iranian military official was specifically overheard complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered years earlier, according to a source familiar with the intelligence. The intercept was one of more than 1,000 pieces of information cited in footnotes to the 150-page classified version of the document, an official said.

Several of those involved in preparing the new assessment said that when intelligence officials began briefing senior members of the Bush administration on the intercepts, beginning in July, the policymakers expressed skepticism. Several of the president’s top advisers suggested the intercepts were part of a clever Iranian deception campaign, the officials said.

The fact that the Administration looked in askance at this new information was prudent, wise, and exactly the right thing to do. After all, it represented a 180 degree turnabout in what we thought we knew about the Iranian nuclear program. The intel folks then vetted the information in a unique manner:

Intelligence officers then spent months examining whether the new information was part of a well-orchestrated ruse. Their effort included “Red Team” exercises in which groups of intelligence officers tried to punch holes in the new evidence, substantially delaying publication of the NIE.

I was mistaken (as was half the liberal blogosphere) when I took the Administration to task for “sitting on the report” for a year. In fact, it appears that the White House had the final report for less than a week before they themselves released it:

Last year, Congress required that key judgments from the NIE be declassified. McConnell said in November that he had no plans to issue an unclassified version, but officials said the dramatic shift in the assessment convinced him otherwise. “Since our understanding of Iran’s nuclear capabilities has changed, we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available,” Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence, said in a statement.

This puts the kibosh on some of my conservative friends who were speculating that this was a leak from the anti-Administration cabal at CIA/Defense/State. It was released by the Administration itself - probably to pre-empt the bureaucrats who would have leaked it anyway.

But no matter how it got out in the open, there is great unhappiness on the right. Michael Ledeen:

At this point, one really has to wonder why anyone takes these documents seriously. How can anyone in his (there was no female name on the document, nor was any woman from the IC present at the press briefing yesterday) right mind believe that the mullahs are rational? Has no one told the IC about the cult of the 12th Imam, on which this regime bases its domestic and foreign policies? Does not the constant chant of “Death to America” mean anything? I suppose not, at least not to the deep thinkers who wrote this policy document.

And as for Iran’s delicate sensitivity to international pressure, just a few days ago, the European ‘foreign minister’ Javier Solana was on the verge of tears when he admitted he had been totally unable to get the Iranians to come clean on their uranium enrichment program, even though he had told them that more sanctions were in the works. Yet, according to the IC, this program–neatly described in a footnote to the “Estimate” as “Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment—really doesn’t have anything to do with nuclear weapons. But if that is so, why are the Iranians so doggedly hiding it from UN inspectors?

Ledeen is a smart guy but he’s either being incredibly disingenuous here or deliberately obtuse. The “12th Imam” clique surrounding Ahmadinejad has been losing influence for a year. Ledeen knows full well that there are other factions in the Iranian hierarchy that are more pragmatic (if not less radical in their hatred of Israel and America) than Ahmadinejad’s true believers who have been stifling his domestic reforms and trying to rein him in on foreign policy.

But Ledeen asks a good question about why the intransigence by the Iranians with IAEA? The reason - and I base this on my reading from a variety of learned sources not any independent thinking of my own - is that Ahmadinejad has made the uranium enrichment issue a national sovereignty issue, thus garnering a tremendous amount of domestic support for continuing the enrichment program. The Iranian president seeks, above all, respect from the international community for Iran’s “achievement” in enriching the tiny amounts of uranium they have been able to process. This is where all his talk about “double standards” on the nuclear issue comes into play. He resists the IAEA because he feels their inspections intrude on what he sees as Iran’s sovereign right to develop what he calls a “peaceful” nuclear program.

Of course, the funny thing about a “peaceful” nuclear program is that the process that enriches uranium to reactor grade level is exactly the same process that enriches the uranium to weapons grade level. As I mentioned yesterday, our intelligence people believe that Iran has suspended work on weapons design, warhead and delivery systems, and other aspects of the nuclear program that could be identified as “single use.” It wouldn’t take much time or effort to get those programs out of mothballs and start them moving again.

It troubles me that both sides in the debate over this document are cherry picking information to buttress their cases. Seen in its totality, I believe this NIE is cautious (perhaps overly so), prudent - in that it takes into consideration what we might not be able to see, - and careful in drawing conclusions. It’s main point - that Iran halted its dual use program in 2003 - appears solid as does its warning that we don’t know if that is still true today. In retrospect, I was too harsh on the Administration yesterday (thanks to my new Watchers Council colleague GW of Wolfs Howling for pointing this out) when I took them to task for their rhetoric. The fact that the White House is still warning the world about possible Iranian nukes is a sound policy that this NIE does nothing to undermine.

This is especially true because the Administration was giving those warnings in the context of trying to get the UN to initiate another round of sanctions. Let’s not forget why these sanctions are in place. The Security Council voted to force Iran to stop enriching uranium until the IAEA could determine the nature of their program. The Iranians refused and sanctions were ordered. And since the Iranians have made no effort to stop since then, more sanctions were applied.

Now the Administration is going for a third round of sanctions. The reason is exactly the same regardless of whether the Iranians have an active weapons program or not; they continue to defy the UN by expanding their enrichment program. Until Iran cooperates fully and the IAEA gives them a clean bill of health (while ensuring compliance through inspections and monitoring), sanctions should continue and be expanded the longer the Iranians refuse. The conclusions drawn by the NIE do not change this situation one iota. It is the enrichment program that poses a danger to the world and must be shut down until there are adequate safeguards in place that the Iranians will not use their knowledge to build a weapon.

One aspect of the NIE wasn’t changed from the 2004 document; the fact that prior to 2003, the Iranians were on track to build a nuclear bomb. Perhaps before the left begins to accuse the Administration of overselling the danger to the world of Iranian nukes, they remember that fact. We can’t read our adversaries minds so what the future aspirations of the Iranians might be with regard to acquiring a nuclear weapon remains hidden. Therefore, prudence dictates we continue our current course (without bombing) until pressure from the Security Council and the rest of the world brings the mullahs to heel and forces them to fully cooperate with the international community in revealing their entire nuclear program and make it available for long term monitoring.

Even if you don’t trust the Iranians farther than you can throw them, the National Intelligence Estimate on their nuclear program should enable you to breathe a sigh of relief. They will not have a bomb anytime soon - 2013 at the earliest according to the NIE - and their program is still plagued with technical problems.

But it is important to look at that program and realize what the NIE is actually saying.

* Iran no longer has an active bomb program. This does not mean they have abandoned the idea of building a nuclear weapon - far from it, I’d say. What it means is that the parts of their nuclear program dealing with bomb making - weapons design, warhead development, delivery vehicle modifications, and probably the bulk of their experimental work - has been shut down or severely curtailed. It is also important to remember that much of what remains still has dual use capabilities, that while they are enriching uranium to reactor grade levels, they are certainly learning how to enrich it further in order to have weapons grade uranium.

* The sanctions are working. It is clear that at least part of the reason the Iranians shut down those parts of their nuclear program dealing exclusively with bomb making is because they feared further sanctions.

* The date of 2013 is probably too pessimistic but is a consensus date that everyone would sign off on. In 2 years, Iran will have several thousand more centrifuges up and running at Nantanz. At that point, assuming they wanted to restart their bomb program, it would probably be a matter of months - a year at most - before they built a bomb. A date closer to 2011 is probably more realistic but was left off in deference to those (and there is apparently a faction in our intel community who believe this) who think Iran is too technologically backward to have a bomb much before 2015.

* The threat of an Iranian bomb will remain as long as Iran is enriching its own uranium.

Jeffrey Lewis chalks up the change to a bureaucratic shuffle initiated by former President Khatami that sought to forestall the matter of Iranian nukes from being taken before the UNSC:

I made this argument in a July 2005 blog post, pointing to a speech about Iranian decision-making by Hassan Rowhani that I called “wonkporn” and suggesting that the bureaucratic reorganization undertaken by Khatami might later been seen as the “beginning [of] a process of negotiations that constrained his more hardline successor.”

Another nuke expert, Paul Kerr, lays out the changes made:

Iran was publicly defiant and resisted cooperating with the IAEA investigation. Yet internally, there were signs that the government was anxious to avoid a potential confrontation with the United Nations. In an apparent attempt to facilitate cooperation with the IAEA, Iran consolidated decision-making authority over its nuclear program around October 2003. Hassan Rowhani, who was the head of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC)—Iran’s top decision-making body on security-related issues—was put in charge of nuclear diplomacy. Previously, oversight of the issue had been divided between Iran’s Foreign Ministry and its Atomic Energy Organization.

For those disposed to disbelieve or reject this NIE, it would be well to remember that if a consensus about something this vital to our security was found among such a fractious, quarrelling, multi-agenda driven group of spooks, you can bet the information it’s based on is pretty solid.

Now we come to the distasteful question of what in God’s name the Bush Administration has been doing sitting on this damn thing for year? And beyond that, is there any Bush supporter out there who believes anything this president says about national security anymore?

We have been treated to the most bombastic rhetoric emanating from this White House for the last year especially - all the while they were sitting on this NIE and its conclusions about the Iranian bomb program. How do you square Bush’s “World War III” comment with what’s in the NIE? Or any other dire warning we’ve heard coming from the White House?

I understand the need for regime change in Iran. I am not naive enough to believe that the Iranian government doesn’t represent a threat to our friends, allies, and interests in the region - nukes or no nukes. But this Administration has made a nasty habit for 7 years now of employing rhetoric on national security matters that doesn’t match what the situation actually is.

Kevin Drum asks why release the NIE now?

Democratic members of the various intelligence committees saw the NIE (or a summary or a verbal report or something) and went ballistic. Footnotes and dissents are one thing, but withholding a report whose primary conclusion is 180 degrees contrary to years of administration innuendo produced a rebellion. Somebody who got briefed must has threatened something pretty serious if the NIE didn’t see the light of day.

Like I said, just a guess. But who else has the clout to force Bush, Cheney, and McConnell to change course?

I don’t necessarily see a change in course since it’s pretty obvious the Administration had been on the diplomatic track for months now. What the NIE does is knock the chocks from underneath the neo-cons and set them adrift. They’ve got nowhere to go now - unless they want to argue that the NIE is wrong.

For different reasons, that’s exactly the argument being made by AJ Strata:

The NIE is quite clear. We know they stopped, we have no intel on whether they are still stopped or not. The reporting that Iran has stopped as of now is not accurate. Here is the scary part - Iran is still processing fuel! They don’t NEED to process fuel for Nuclear Energy. Russia has offered to SELL THEM fuel if they return the spent fuel so it cannot be used to make weapons

.

While AJ is right, that Russian offer was conditional on the Iranians halting their enrichment program - something that Ahmadinejad has now made (for largely domestic reasons) a national sovereignty issue and therefore, non negotiable.

Is bombing still a viable option? Unless you believe that the mullahs will not be dissuaded from eventually restarting the bomb making parts of their nuclear program then taking out the infrastructure is still on the table.

I still think bombing would be a bad idea - at least until we can say for sure that they have restarted that part of their program. The fact is, there is no reason for military action against Iran at the moment and every reason to continue applying pressure via sanctions to try and get them to stop enriching uranium. It also gives us time to develop and encourage those elements in Iran who could work to moderate or replace the regime - the latter being much more likely than the former.

The point is that time is once again our friend. Let’s use it wisely.

It’s pretty sickening the way the left has reacted to the defeat of Hugo Chavez’s bid to turn Venezuela into a full fledged dictatorship rather than the authoritarian government he currently enjoys leading. And my-oh-my are they all puffed up about Chavez being so gracious in defeat - just like a regular politician in a democratic country.

Of course, lefty commentary on the vote tends to leave out just a few, minor details - like the desperate effort by the opposition at CNE (the electoral commission in charge of the vote) headquarters early this morning to hold Chavez to his word and carry out some semblance of a fair count of the ballots. Apparently, the NO! forces were being denied access to the totals - a clear violation of the law and pretty suspicious to boot. There were reports that scuffles broke out as the opposition tried to exercise their right and the Chavistas tried to stop them.

It apparently took a personal TV appearance by former defense minister and former Chavez ally General Raul Baduel who appeared late in the evening and demanded that the results - which were electronically counted and should have been available within a couple of hours after the polls closed - be released immediately.

It’s a story that will probably dribble out in the next few days as Venezuelan students - who took the place of international poll observers because Chavez didn’t allow them in for this vote - will add up their “hot audit sheets” from each district and see just how close this election truly was.

Most pre-election polls had NO! winning by 55% or greater. For those on the left who are sneering about the fact that Chavez didn’t try and rig the election, I would suggest you wait a day or two. There certainly were some strange things going on at CNE headquarters in the wee hours of the morning.

And one rumor is the final margin of victory for the opposition was actually negotiated between the two sides so that Chavez could save face with a razor thin loss rather than the 57%-58% that some polls were showing prior to the vote. That particular rumor seems wildly off base - until you remember we’re talking about Chavez’s Venezuela where after the last presidential election, half full ballot boxes disappeared for hours only to turn up later stuffed to the brim with votes for Chavez.

Anything is possible.

Buttressing the idea of vote manipulation is that the government cancelled its victory celebration for the following day around 9:00 PM - more than 4 hours before the tally was finally announced. And if it had been an honest vote, why didn’t Chavez demand a recount? The margin of victory for the opposition - 1.7% - was small enough that a recount request would not have been out of line.

So a strange night in Venezuela indeed. But not if you’re reading lefty blogs today. In the cockeyed world of liberal blogs, all that matters is that Chavez has “proved” he’s not a dictator:

“It’s nice that some countries believe in limiting executive power. Now compare that with things like…” (Bush, the dictator)

Last time I looked, Bush wasn’t ruling by decree. Nor was the President nationalizing industries, using para-military militias to shoot and kill his opponents, close down the New York Times or CNN because of their negative coverage, or any one of a dozen “limited” powers exercised by Mr. Chavez.

“The Bushies have called Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez a dictator and a tyrant… but since when do dictators lose elections?”

Since the margin of their defeat is so big they can’t get away with vote rigging.

He’s a left wing populist with an authoritarian streak, but no matter what they say it’s “left wing populist” which makes the Villagers froth, not the authoritarian part. There are plenty of dictators around the world which get respectful treatment from our media, and the anti-Democratic authoritarian actions of our own president disturb them not at all.

An “authoritarian streak?” (See above). More like a meglomaniacal, power hungry, demagogue with a mean streak. Besides, some people like to differentiate between those who purport to be our “friends” to one degree or another (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan) and those who are declared enemies like guess who. That sort of real politik formulation doesn’t sit well with our moral betters on the left. But then, when one is a “leftist populist” all manner of sins are forgiven - especially if he’s an enemy of the United States.

“I would be the last to claim that Hugo Chavez is a saint, or even a politician worth emulating. But I do find it interesting that when faced with the will of the people, Bush ignored that will and Chavez bowed to it. One we are told, is a vile threat to the freedom of his nation becasue of his incessant power grabs and disdain for democratic process. The other is a great leader of men, fully committed to democracy in his home country and abroad. If I hadn’t attached names to this story, could you tell which was supposed to be which?

I’m not sure exactly how to respond to this idiocy except perhaps to say that if we had a President who governed solely by “the will of the people,” chances are pretty good we’d have all manner of interesting social and political baggage that the gentleman would no doubt find disgusting. Slavery? Perhaps not. It certainly wouldn’t have died as a result of the civil war. And Jim Crow would have died a lot later than it eventually did. Would women have the vote? Vox populi, vox dei makes for a nice campaign slogan but horrible government.

To be fair, a couple of lefties got it right. Kevin Drum:

So the constitutional changes were rejected (good); Chavez didn’t try — very hard, anyway — to rig the election (also good); and apparently he’s willing to accept the negative results (yet more good). All in all, a satisfying result so far. We’ll see what comes next.

As far as “accepting the negative results,” that’s true - today:

However, Chavez promised to continue his pursuit of the defeated proposals.

“Not a single comma of this proposal will be withdrawn,” he said, holding up a small red book containing the text of the proposed changes. “I will continue proposing this to the Venezuelan people. The proposal is alive, not dead.”

It makes one wonder whether Chavez will try another way to get these proposals enacted or whether he’ll simply wait a few months or a year and try again. He’s got more than 4 years to get the SI! vote he wants.

And Booman also analyzed the situation intelligently:

This is how things should be. I have no problem with Venezuela staking out its independence from America. But they should keep their Constitution and the balance of powers. When Chavez fulfills his term it will be time for someone else.

We can only hope.

The smug, self satisfaction, however, evident in many blog posts from the left leave little doubt that liberals will put up with a lot from an authoritarian socialist - just as long as he “speaks truth to power” by calling Bush childish names and sticks it to the rich. By doing that, he can get away with ruling by decree, attacking and intimidating his political foes, shutting down opposition media, and generally acting like a bully and a thug in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Here are the rules. Follow them or your comment will be deleted.

Any fair minded person perusing this blog and its comments will see I allow plenty of leeway for people to criticize what I write - my ideas included. Anyone who tries to argue otherwise hasn’t read the comments, period. But I will not abide personal insults nor insults to other commenters. And if you have problem putting more than 3 words together in the English language, do not fill the void with expletives.

Comments will be open until I get sick of the trolls again - probably a couple of weeks. I figure life is to short to have to endure the aggravations caused by of half wits, nitwits, and peawits.