President Bush offered fresh evidence in his State of the Union address last night that not all decision-makers share the intelligence community's view on Iran's nuclear ambitions. Although he was remarkably restrained in his rhetoric--particularly in comparison to years past--Bush homed in on Iran's uranium enrichment and ballistic missile programs to remind us that the country still poses a mortal threat.
Tehran is also developing ballistic missiles of increasing range and continues to develop its capability to enrich uranium, which could be used to create a nuclear weapon. [Note: The recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program doesn't contradict him on this point.] ... Our message to the leaders of Iran is also clear: Verifiably suspend your nuclear enrichment, so negotiations can begin. And to rejoin the community of nations, come clean about your nuclear intentions and past actions, stop your oppression at home and cease your support for terror abroad. But above all, know this: America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf.
The NIE concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, but it narrowly defined said program as "Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work," as well as its covert work to convert and enrich uranium. In other words, this assessment does not cover Iran's civilian enrichment work, which holds so-called "breakout potential" for a weapons program, nor does it cover work on building a missile to deliver a bomb. Still, it seems the community's view is that a full weapons program cannot come to fruition without the key weaponization piece.
The president, though, clearly thinks otherwise, and he's not alone. No less than the Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, said recently that he thinks--apparently despite the NIE's findings--that Iran is on the path to obtaining a nuclear weapon.
This all could be evidence of a high-level split between the intelligence community and its customers. But there's another possibility. Intelligence is a special policy input, but it is, in the end, just one input. It's usually a mistake to take any single NIE or intelligence stream as dispositive. The president learned that painful lesson in the run-up to war in Iraq. Some might find it refreshing that this administration, even if in its final days, is not once again hanging its policy towards a key Middle Eastern country on inherently murky intelligence. It just may be that this time the country in question actually does have nuclear weapons, despite what the intelligence community believes.
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Iran, Politics
President Bush has signed a directive that formally kicks off what intelligence reporters have been chronicling for months: The National Security Agency, the nation's electronic eavesdropping agency, will take a new, presumably aggressive role in responding to Internet-based attacks against government agencies.
The Washington Post broke news of Bush's directive on Friday, and the Baltimore Sun had been following this in considerable detail for months. Of particular interest is the distinctly military character of this new plan, known simply as the "cyber initiative" inside government. According to the Post, once the NSA determines that a hostile nation or Internet threat is targeting a government system, the Pentagon can strike back.
The Pentagon can plan attacks on adversaries' networks if, for example, the NSA determines that a particular server in a foreign country needs to be taken down to disrupt an attack on an information system critical to the U.S. government. That could include responding to an attack against a private-sector network, such as the telecom industry's, sources said.
Don't miss the importance of that last sentence. Our government's critical and sensitive information systems run on or are dependent upon privately-owned networks. An attack on AT&T, under this new initiative, can constitute an attack on the nation. The military's cyber attack capabilities are something of an open secret. Commanders love not to talk about them in on-the-record interviews.
This new initiative is meant to send a signal to our chief Cyber Cold War adversary, China: "We are going on the offensive." This campaign will, in some ways, be more significant than the war on terrorism. It will cost billions of dollars, implicate just as many of our most important policies--from privacy to secrecy to the authorities of the intelligence agencies--and ultimately could be a prelude to more overt, off-line conflicts. Settle in. This will be a long ride.
Labels: Cyber Cold War, Director of National Intelligence, National Security Agency, NSA surveillance
The Protect America Act, a six-month modification to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that directly affects the National Security Agency's terrorist surveillance program, expires on Feb. 1. It's looking more and more like the Congress will punt on this one, passing another temporary extension--perhaps as short as one month--while lawmakers try and sort out a compromise on the law's most intractable issue: immunity for telecom companies that assisted the government in the NSA program after the 9/11 attacks.
The fact that there has yet been no bargain on this point is an excellent measure of just how politically poisonous the debate over intelligence gathering has become. When Protect America was enacted last summer, no one thought a permanent law would be stymied by the immunity debate. As I wrote last month, immunity is actually a Trojan Horse for the administration's critics to pry loose more information about classified intelligence activities.
Very few lawmakers honestly believe that the telecom companies acted in bad faith when they helped the government monitor phone calls and e-mails, and very few want to expose those companies to potentially devastating lawsuits. There is also very little practical difference in the kind of permanent eavesdropping laws that Republicans and Democrats want to enact. (See Ben Wittes' excellent analysis on this fromThe New Republic.)
Given their positions, there's no logical reason, or even a very principled one, why congressional Democrats and Republicans and the White House can't hammer out a deal here. The FISA debate has now become utterly political. And despite how one feels about the merits of this law or its proposed changes, history shows us that the mix of politics and intelligence is a dangerous one.
Labels: FISA, Law, National Security Agency, NSA surveillance, Politics
Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker has a new (very long) piece on DNI Mike McConnell, the culmination of an apparently extraordinary level of access and series of intimate interviews. (Wright and McConnell ate together and flew once on the DNI's private plane.)
While I hate to say the piece didn't do much to illuminate McConnell's character, it also may have buried the lead. In the third to last paragraph of the 18-page article, the DNI drops what I consider a mini-bombshell: He thinks that Iran "is on the path to get a nuclear weapon."
That assessment stands in contrast to the intelligence community's official, coordinated judgment that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003. That was the remarkable turn-about contained in the unclassified key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which McConnell released--after publicly vowing not to--last month.
Now, the NIE was uncertain about whether Iran was restarting its nuclear weapons program, and it certainly left open the possibility, but it seems to me a dramatic public pronouncement for the DNI to say he personally believes there's no doubt about Iran's intentions.
Here's the passage in question from Wright's article.
When we last spoke, McConnell said, 'There’s no doubt in this observer’s mind that Iran is on the path to get a nuclear weapon. It will force an arms race in the region.'As Wright chronicles in his piece, McConnell has recently shown a tendency to say things off-the-cuff that turn out to be not quite accurate, but this statement is rather emphatic. Indeed, the term "no doubt" is a much bolder assertion than the intelligence community's mark of "high confidence," used in NIEs to indicate that the assessment is based on high-quality information. One has to presume that, as the nation's top intelligence official, McConnell has access to the very best information. So what does he know that we don't after reading the NIE?
For background on the build-up to the NIE's release, see my story from National Journal last month, "The Other About Face on Iran."
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Iran