Entries in Intelligence (13)
A Nuclear Iran Could Attack U.S., Warns Israel
December 17, 2008 in Intelligence The Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned the U.S. that allowing Iran to go nuclear could have the worst consequences on the United States. With Russian assistance, a nuclear Iran now seems almost certain:
“If it built even a primitive nuclear weapon like the type that destroyed Hiroshima, Iran would not hesitate to load it on a ship, arm it with a detonator operated by GPS and sail it into a vital port on the east coast of North America,” Mr Barak told a conference of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. Indicating the possibility of an Israeli military strike on Iran, Mr Barak said: “We are not taking any option off the table, and we recommend to the world not to take any option off the table, and we mean what we say.”
Israel: Iran could attack US with nuclear bomb, London Telegraph
Newsweek Exposes 'Stellar Wind' Program
December 14, 2008 in Intelligence Newsweek looks back at the battle between President Bush and the Justice Department about the scope and manner of one particular NSA surveillance program. The article describes a large data mining effort which analyzed patterns in email and phone traffic…
The NSA’s powerful computers became vast storehouses of “metadata.” They collected the telephone numbers of callers and recipients in the United States, and the time and duration of the calls. They also collected and stored the subject lines of e-mails, the times they were sent, and the addresses of both senders and recipients. By one estimate, the amount of data the NSA could suck up in close to real time was equivalent to one quarter of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica per second. (The actual content of calls and e-mails was not being monitored as part of this aspect of the program, the sources say.) All this metadata was then sifted by the NSA, using complex algorithms to detect patterns and links that might indicate terrorist activity.
The battle started when Jack Goldsmith at the US Justice Department reviewed the legal justification of the program and believed it to be illegal, an opinion which continues to be debatable.
The identity of the person who called The New York Times has also been revealed. It was Thomas Tamm (also at USDOJ), who was “motivated in part by his anger at other Bush-administration policies at the Justice Department.” Newsweek calls him a “whistleblower who exposed warrantless wiretaps”. It is ironic that Tamm was disturbed by the legality of the methods of intelligence gathering, while less concerned about his own disclosure of classified information to the press. Was there really no internal mechanism for dealing with his concerns?
Now We Know What the Battle Was About, Newsweek
The Whistleblower Who Exposed Warrantless Wiretaps, Newsweek
Hussein's Not 'Directly Linked' to al Qaeda
March 14, 2008 in Intelligence A report released by the Joint Forces Command confirms Hussein supported a number of terrorists and terrorist activities inside and outside Iraq. The report failed to identify a “direct link” between Hussein and terrorists calling themselves “al Qaeda,” but found that Hussein co-operated with them.
The Iraqi regime was involved in regional and international terrorist operations prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq. State sponsorship of terrorism became such a routine tool of state power that Iraq developed elaborate bureaucratic processes to monitor progress and accountability in the recruiting, training and resourcing of terrorists.
The report cited such examples as training for car bombs and suicide bombings in 1999 and 2000, both of which U.S. and Iraqi forces have struggled to contain since the rise of the insurgency in summer 2003.
Pentagon Report Finds No Direct Saddam-al-Qaida Connection, VOA
Also see: Saddam’s Dangerous Friends: What a Pentagon review of 600,000 Iraqi documents tells us, Weekly Standard
Iran's Small Boats Pack a Punch
January 20, 2008 in Intelligence David Crist writes in today’s NY Times that Iran’s small boats are actually a big problem that we’ve known about for years.
In December, the Whidbey Island, a Navy dock-landing ship, fired warning shots at small Iranian craft that came too close. Three days later the frigate Carr was forced to use its ship’s horn to ward off three Iranian small boats, two of which were armed, according to Navy spokesmen. While these incidents may not seem alarming to those who’ve never served on a potentially vulnerable modern warship, they fit into a worrisome pattern, a two-decade-old military strategy by Iran intended to counter the United States presence in the Persian Gulf.
Iran’s Small Boats Are a Big Problem, David Crist, NY Times
Misreading the Iran Report
December 12, 2007 in Intelligence Why Spying and Policymaking Don’t Mix
The extraordinary spectacle of the president’s national security adviser obliged to defend the president’s Iran policy against a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) raises two core issues: How are we now to judge the nuclear threat posed by Iran? How are we to judge the intelligence community’s relationship with the White House and the rest of the government?
Continue Reading: Misreading the Iran Report, Henry A. Kissinger
American Intelligence
December 12, 2007 in Intelligence The citizens of the free world have nothing to worry any more — America’s spy masters have recovered their missing crystal ball. No fewer than 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have just told us that the Iranian nuclear program really is not so dangerous. According to the National Intelligence Estimate, Tehran has, for reasons yet to be explained, supposedly stopped the military plank of its atomic research. Before rolling out the peace banners, though, it’s worth looking at the agencies’ track record in getting these sorts of “estimates” right…
Continue Reading: American Intelligence, Claude Moniquet, WSJ
Pearls Before Swine
Day By Day
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