Iran did something fairly important this week, in the grand scheme of things. Iran proved that President Bush and his “Axis of Evil” comment was accurate, and that President/Senator Obama (and all his liberal allies with blinders on) with his Pollyannish “Iran is not a threat” was wrong. Deadly wrong.

Is anyone going to believe – now after Iran’s admission of a secret nuclear processing facility – that Iran kept secret a purely peaceful nuclear facility all these years Especially when it had one out in the open already? Why would you keep one secret and the other out in the open? Can any serious person envision using the facility in the  open as a deception, while the secret one generates peaceful nuclear technologies? Who is that naive and stupid? Combine this news with their known missile program (and their mad leader’s claims to wipe Israel off the map) and it becomes clear that Iran is taking this world into the abyss of hell.

And what does this tell us about our intelligence community – which completely missed the nuclear program of Saddam Hussien in the mid 1990′ (took a defector after Gulf War I to wake them up that time), missed 9-11, Qaddafi’s nuclear program, Pakistan’s nuclear program, the AQ Kahn nuclear smuggling ring - and now missed Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program?

Well, it tells us we cannot trust their judgement, let alone their carefully crafted leaks to the pliant and naive news media.

Back in 2007 and interesting bit of of propaganda was leaked to the press, no doubt to influence the pending 2008 elections. It was an National Intelligence Estimate on Iran and it was unique in many ways. First off, it was not a consensus NIE, but was pushed through by by left leaning bureaucrats who were ready to push false impressions to change the leadership of this country. It was a con that implied Iran and mended its ways, and stopped trying to make nuclear weapons. It was meant to make Bush out to be a bully, and liberals out to be compassionate and caring.

I wrote about the misrepresented and misreported NIE many times (here, here, here, here, to name a few). The last one is very enlightening, given the shocking news  dumped on President Obama and all is naive followers yesterday. The authors of this NIE are very important, since it was they who gave America the impression, now known to be false, that Iran was behaving and safe.

Our own “confidence” is not heightened by the fact that the NIE’s main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as “hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials,” according to an intelligence source. They are Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Kenneth Brill went into private industry – to make some serious money no doubt (why give up all those great federal health care plans?). Tom Fingar, as my post at the time noted, hails from the same place as one Valerie Plame,. Plame arose ,with her husband Joe Wilson, to lay false charges against Bush and the  Iraq War, something about forged Niger uranium documents – that were held in the same CIA office as Plame. Too bad they forgot to check the dates on the forgeries with Joe Wilson’s CIA sponsored trip to Iraq before trying to claim the Iraq War was based on forged information. Their own false claims fell apart when it was clear the forgery in question came out 6 months after Wilson’s trip to Niger. That all started in 2002.

In 2007, JoshuaPundit had this news at the time political disinformation NIE came out:

Fingar was a key partner of Senate Democrats in their successful effort to derail the confirmation of John Bolton in the spring of 2005 to become the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. As the head of the NIC, Fingar has gone out of his way to fire analysts “who asked the wrong questions,” and who challenged the politically-correct views held by Fingar and his former State Department colleagues, as revealed in “Shadow Warriors.” ( Timmerman’s book -ff).

Fingar is well known to be in denial about the threats to this country. He is well known to play politics and not do his job. To this day there are many more Fingars all through the bureaucracy, the type who feel it is illegal to trace calls to overseas terrorists to persons in this country without a warrant, which requires proof of wrong doing. These are the idiot bureaucrats that led to 9-11 happening. Ineptitude driven by God complexes is wide spread in the bureaucracies in DC – which is why the place needs a good cleaning out and fresh blood which respects the boundaries of the offices being held.

But the real problem was not Fingar, as I suspected at the time. He went on to brief the two presidential candidates prior to the election, then went to academia to fill some heads with nonsense. The Problem apparently was Vann Van Diepen:

“Van Diepen was an enormous problem,” a former colleague of his from the State Department told me when I was fact gathering for “Shadow Warriors.”

“He was insubordinate, hated WMD sanctions, and strived not to implement them,” even though it was his specific responsibility at State to do so, the former colleague told me.

More here from Bill Gertz’s book “The Failure Factory“:

The officials told me that the principle Iran NIE author was Van Diepen, who had last worked in an intelligence role in the 1980’s, when he served in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR).

For those who know the Valerie Plame story, the INR is another one of those key organizations surrounding Plame and Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger. Anyway:

Van Diepen had repeatedly tried to block conservative efforts within the US government to get tough on international arms proliferators like China and Russia …

Van Diepen was, like many others in the national security bureaucracy, devoted to toothless arms-control policies … That put him at odds with the Bush administration’s national security policies. …

Read the whole sordid tale, but Diepen was refusing lawful directions and began his little coup d’ etat early on.

When the bogus Iran NIE came out two things were obvious even to the casual viewer with an understanding of DC bureaucratese – the language of deception and misinformation. First off, the NIE claimed with confidence Iran halted its nuclear weapons program (yes folks, they did have one) in early 2003. This was because the invasion of Iraq made them think twice (it made Qaddaffi crap his pants so bad he turned over his nuclear weapons program materials – another surprise to the liberal dolts in the intelligence community).

That was claimed with high confidence. There are only three levels of confidence in the NIE: high (good evidence), medium (guessing) and low (who knows). Nothing below high should even be discussed. But the news media did their part and blared all kinds of nonsense about one other part of the NIE that was rated medium, and which was apparently forced into the piece of propaganda by the liberal 3 Amigos.

And that claim was Iran had not restarted their weapons program up again since. As I wrote back then, this was at best wishful thinking, at worst a concoction of someone’s imagination. It was not a fact, as I noted:

So in 2005 (and supposedly 2003, etc) the intel claimed Iran was building up the capability to produce nuclear weapons material. But now all that intelligence (and the UN and the blustering Ahmedinejad) were wrong? Something is happening here. This smells like another leak by forces in our intel community trying to – once again – influence our national elections.

…

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.

I even noted a line the news media never got around to reporting:

The estimate does say that Iran’s ultimate goal is still to develop the capability to produce nuclear weapon.

…

The new report concludes that if Iran were to end the freeze of its weapons program, it would still be at least two years before Tehran would have enough highly enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb. But it says it is still “very unlikely” Iran could produce enough of the material by then.

Instead, the N.I.E. concludes it is more likely Iran could have a bomb by the early part to the middle of the next decade. The report states that the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research judges Iran is unlikely to achieve this goal before 2013, “because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems.”

This is pretty scary stuff. Back then, with Pollyannish assumptions Iran was not working on weapons and these clowns did not know about the second procssing facility, the range of time for Iran to go nuclear was 2009-2013. It seems we are here now, and President Obama has been caught off guard – again.

Bush was right to question the NIE. And President Obama was wrong to embrace it so publicly when he was Senator Obama:

By reporting that Iran halted its nuclear weapon development program four years ago because of international pressure, the new National Intelligence Estimate makes a compelling case for less saber-rattling and more direct diplomacy. The juxtaposition of this NIE with the president’s suggestion of World War III serves as an important reminder of what we learned with the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: members of Congress must carefully read the intelligence before giving the President any justification to use military force.

…

I think Iran continues to be a threat to some of its neighbors in the region. … But it is absolutely clear that this administration and President Bush continues to not let facts get in the way of his ideology.

Our naive young president also had this to say about Iran:

“They don’t pose a serious threat to us in the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us,” Obama told a cheering audience, explaining why he doesn’t think we need to worry about “tiny” countries like Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and Iran.

Nuclear bombs can make a single person a serious threat, since they can take out 100 of thousands, maybe millions of people. Size doesn’t matter.

In one of those ‘where are they now’ questions, it seems one of the 3 Amigos who hoisted these false impressions on the nation and helped propel an inexperienced junior senator to the White House has himself a promotion. It is no surprise the man who started to defy our elected leaders and literally break the laws of this nation, Vann Van Diepen, has moved up in the administration of President Obama:

Vann H. Van Diepen has been Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation (ISN) since June 2009. From February 2006 to June 2009, he was National Intelligence Officer for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Proliferation in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, advising the Director on those issues, serving as the Intelligence Community (IC) spokesman on them and producing National Intelligence Estimates and other IC analyses.

From September 2005 to February 2006, Mr. Van Diepen directed the State Department’s Office of Missile Threat Reduction.

Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary! Wow, his business cards must be huge with such a lofty title. It seems Van Diepen has faired very well since he pushed out the 2007 Iran NIE to the public.

Sadly for him, he would make a mighty fine witness in front of Congress to explain why his NIE was so wrong, and how he and his fellow bureaucrats charged with protecting the world from nuclear holocaust could have screwed up so badly. Diepen looks to be the prime lightening rod and scape goat.

President Bush was right about Iran, and our young and naive current president was wrong. Since 9-11 it is imperative we make sure we understand when and how our intel is badly flawed and leaves us and the world open to deadly consequences.

Tags: Brill, Bush, Fingar, Iran, NIE, Nuclear Weapons, Obama, Van Diepen