by Ray McGovern
http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=13442
Thomas Fingar,
the
Not that the Fawning
Corporate Media (FCM) has exactly trumpeted this important conclusion. One has
to read down to paragraph 16 of an article titled "Reduced Dominance Is
Predicted for the U.S.," but there it is, right there on an inside page of
Sept. 10's Washington Post.
It is the 64-dollar question
– whether or not there is evidence that
(NIE) of
November 2007 that it had stopped.
The Post's Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus
quote Fingar as saying there is no evidence that
For those who do not
remember, Fingar was head of the State Department's
intelligence unit in 2002, when he courageously resisted the efforts of
super-analyst Dick Cheney and his tool, then-CIA Director George Tenet, to
manufacture – out of whole cloth – a "reconstituted" Iraqi nuclear
weapons program.
Despite Fingar's
resistance, that judgment appeared in the Oct. 1, 2002, NIE on
Fingar, who is now head of the
National Intelligence Council and supervises the preparation of NIEs and the President's Daily Brief, spoke in
His remarks, particularly
those during his evening keynote address on Sept. 4, are well worth a read –
particularly for those numerous observers who have concluded that articulate,
trenchant analysis of world trends is a thing of the past.
In remarks made earlier that
day, Fingar made it clear that he had set a new tone
when he took over as chief substantive analyst for the intelligence
community. No longer would he tolerate
using quantity of intelligence products as a measure of effectiveness.
The intelligence he was/is
determined to provide had to be, in his words, "more useful...It had to be
on target...It had to be there at the right time, in the right place, with the
right information, with important insights...We had to know exactly what our
customers needed."
Even if they did not want to
hear it, he might have added.
The gutsy NIE of November
2007 stated that, contrary to what President George W. Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney had been saying throughout 2007, the nuclear weapons-related
portion of
The good news was that, at
the insistence of our most senior military, who realize what a debacle it would
be to attack
The Bad News
Tom Fingar
plays second fiddle to Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and his
principal deputy, Donald Kerr. It is those two (God help us) who brief the
president six mornings a week with the President's Daily Brief.
On a substantive
sophistication scale of 1 to 10, Fingar has earned a
10, in my view; McConnell and Kerr are between a 3 and 4. They spent their
previous intelligence careers running satellites and surveillance activities.
McConnell, while testifying
before Congress shortly after being confirmed in his new job, seemed mystified
as to why Israeli intelligence on
As for Donald Kerr, one need
only read his vapid prepared remarks before the pro-Israel Washington Institute
for Near East Policy on May 29, 2008, to get a sense of what he brings to the
substantive table.
Kerr took an interestingly
different line on Iran, consistent with talking points handed out to the New
York Times and other FCM two days earlier. Rather than repeating what the NIE
of November 2007 said, Kerr was agnostic about whether the Iranians had
restarted weapons-related activities ("we do not know" became the
phrasing).
The relevant NIE key
judgment reads: "We assess with moderate confidence
The Kerr kind of fudging
makes it easier for not only Bush and Cheney, but also lesser lights like
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen to
obfuscate on this key question.
Gates claims
Although Cheney (and
presumably Bush) no doubt would like them to be more alarmist, Mullen and other
more sober characters have settled on the curious formulation that Iran is
"on a path" to nuclear weapons.
Strange path, with