Please see updates below – it seems someone near the White House, possibly the Baker-Hamilton Iraq group, exposed ongoing intelligence efforts and sources inside Iran.

The CIA (or, to be fair, someone who read their analysis) is still leaking like a sieve to the liberal media and endangering our national security. Seymour Hersh – who hates America – is at it again. He uses basically useless intelligence (satellite images) to conclude there is no effort by Iran to create a nuclear bomb. This is the classic case of someone dealing in issues well out of his mental grasp. Satellite images will not help detect anything inside deep bunkers. The article is a big long liberal fantasy about why worrying about winning the 2008 Presidential election should trump national security. It is this kind of warped thinking that rightfully tags liberals as incapable of dealing with national security. But here is the gist of Hersh’s ignorance:

The C.I.A.’s analysis, which has been circulated to other agencies for comment, was based on technical intelligence collected by overhead satellites, and on other empirical evidence, such as measurements of the radioactivity of water samples and smoke plumes from factories and power plants. Additional data have been gathered, intelligence sources told me, by high-tech (and highly classified) radioactivity-detection devices that clandestine American and Israeli agents placed near suspected nuclear-weapons facilities inside Iran in the past year or so. No significant amounts of radioactivity were found.

The information from satellites is pretty much useless. Radiation detection devices can be fooled by shielding, and water samples can be useless too if there is not seepage into the environment. But an even simpler way to avoid detection is the old bait and switch. To use many of these methods you have to be looking at the right location.

The CIA has missed so much it is unbelievable they would be considered credible. They missed Hussein’s nuclear weapons program, and North Korea’s, and Pakistan’s – I am assuming India notified them to make it easy on the CIA – and they missed Libya’s. In fact, the only nuclear programs they seem aware of our those of our allies. What about the weapons grade uranium found by the IAEA? What about the nuclear trigger the CIA gave to Iran under Bill Clinton? What about all the bravado coming out of Iran about wiping Israel off the map? What about the news that Tehran has tested a nuclear fuse? This is both a troubling sign and another leak of our intelligence capabilities to our enemies. Who just exposed an Israeli source?he White House correctly dismissing Hersh and his pathetic naivette regarding this matter. The CIA should be shut down and all the analysts moved to another organization until these leaks end. We do not need to have Seymour Hersh exposing our detection methods for nuclear weapons programs to our enemies in his lame attempt to grasp a technically very complicated issue. Someone needs to go to jail over this one.

Update: Hersh not only exposed our detection methods AND an Isreali source who learned of Tehran’s success with a nuclear trigger (the design of which probably came from Clinton and the CIA), but it exposed our clandestine efforts with the Kurds to unfiltrate Iran (from the previous linked source):

The report also stated that in the past six months, Israel and the United States had been working together to support a Kurdish resistance group known as the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan.

The group had been conducting clandestine cross-border forays into Iran, Hersh said he was told by a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon civilian leadership, as “part of an effort to explore alternative means of applying pressure on Iran.”

Clearly the mole is near the White House – and I would wager part of the Iraq Group headed by Baker and Hamilton. Here is why I think so:

Iran has developed and tested a trigger device for a nuclear bomb, Israeli agents stationed there have told the White House, according to a report published in the New Yorker on Monday morning.

According to the report, written by Seymour M. Hersh, the White House received the information but did not hand it to the CIA.

Clearly this treasonous source had access to the CIA report and the Trigger intel (which the CIA did not know about). That puts the mole somewhere near the White House. The source is clearly identified as a consultant with access to the Pentagon and White House civilian leadership. The only new group near the White House is Baker’s Iraq Group, which has access to this kind of information. Time for the FBI to get involved. These leaks put all these sources and efforts in serious danger.