DOJ, Voting Laws, & The Left In Full Moral Outrage

EJ Dionne, writing at the Washington Post, is outraged that anyone is paying any attention to either DOJ whistleblower J. Christian Adams or the Dept. of Justice's decision to drop charges in the case of the New Black Panthers. He is in equaly incoherent rage that anyone is paying any attention to Fox News. Eugene Robinson has likewise written the same in his most recent op-ed at the Washington Post, tossing in a charge of racism for even raising the issue that the DOJ may be racist in its application of the law:

After the Shirley Sherrod episode, there's no longer any need to mince words: A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites.

A few of the purveyors of this bigoted nonsense might actually believe it. Most of them, however, are merely seeking political gain by inviting white voters to question the motives and good faith of the nation's first African American president. This is really about tearing Barack Obama down. . . .

Then there is Bob Herbert at the NYT, as well as their resident drama queen, Frank Rich - and do see see this ridiculous piece by Brian Stetler. Each one of those pieces, and I dare say hundereds of others throughout the nation this past week, hits precisely the same talking points. They are:

- Fox is racist propagana machine which no other media outlet should follow

- Fox played a central role in getting Shirley Sherrod fired (all studiously ignoring that Fox News Channel never mentioned Sherrod's name prior to her being fired)

- The DOJ's refusal to prosecute the New Black Panthers for voter intimidation is not merely meaningless, but to even ask that the matter be investigated is racist

- J. Christian Adams was once a poll watcher for the Bush administration and thus he has no legitimacy.

This is damage control by the left because the race card is losing its legitimacy. They want to make the charges of reverse racism at the DOJ go the way of Rev. Jeremiah Wright during the election campaign - just fade away. It is a blatant attempt to stifle any discussion of the issues raised by Mr. Adams. The fact that they can work in an ad hominem attack against Fox News is, to them, just an added bennie.

Let's review the charges that have been raised against the Obama DOJ, taking not that they go far beyond just the New Black Panther matter.

1. The DOJ's prosecution of the New Black Panther case was dismissed after a judgment of guilt had been entered. There was no apparent reason for this dismissal.

1A. The DOJ has flatly refused to honor lawful subpoenas to answer questions before the Civil Rights Commission investigating whether the dismissal was based on racial preference.

1B. In addition, the DOJ has transferred the key witness who was handling the New Black Panther case, Christopher Coates, to South Carolina, outside the reach of the subpoena power of the Civil Rights Commission.

2. A very serious charge has been leveled that the DOJ, again on grounds of race, is refusing to enforce Secion 8 of the Voting Rights Act - that part of the motor voter law that requires states to periodically update their voting roles by purging the rolls of the deceased, felons, and others ineligible to vote.

2A. J. Christian Adams has testified under oath that by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes that "We're not interested in those kind of cases. What do they have to do with helping increase minority access and turnout? We want to increase access to the ballot, not limit it." The only possible way this could increase access to the ballot would be to invite vote fraud.

2B. In March, 2009, the the Obama DOJ dropped a case filed in 2006 against Missouri, for that state's refusal to clean up its voting rolls. The suit alleged that over 33% of Missouri counties had more registered voters than residents of voting age. The state had done nothing to clean up the voting rolls when the suit was dismissed.

3. According to Abigail Thernstrom, there is also reason to be concerned that the Obama DOJ is going to improperly use its powers under the Voting Rights Act to force race conscious drawing of political districts following the 2010 Census.

4. The DOJ is apparently stonewalling implementation of the MOVE act designed to insure that the votes of our soldiers deployed outside of their home states are counted. In the 2008 election, 17,000 military votes went uncounted. According to Eric Eversole in today's Washington Times, because of the DOJ's refusal to enforce the Move act, military voters will again face widespread disenfranchisement in the 2010 election. (H/T Instapundit)

There is more than ample cause to be concerned that Obama's Dept. of Justice is acting unlawfully by deliberate and racially unequal application of the Voting Rights Act. Indeed, the charges made above go directly to the sanctity of the ballot box - and thus to the very foundation of legitimacy of our form of government.

The left's desire to push this aside using the race card is scandalous. All of this is deserving of a thorough investigation. There is no doubt that allegations of this type of conduct by the DOJ during the Bush years would have seen the MSM clear cutting entire old growth forests to get enough paper to handle the avalanche of outraged opinion pieces and supposedly objective news articles decrying the DOJ. And indeed, on charges of "politicization," the left spent months destroying the carreer of Bush AG Alberto Gonzalez. "Politicization" is a meaningless charge. Racism in the unequal application of our voting laws is not.
To add an addendum, there has been much back and forth of late on the right regarding whether or not the right should be pursuing the New Black Panther matter. Abigail Thernstrom of the Civil Rights Commission believes that the matter is too small to warrant much attention and that conservatives are blowing it out of proportion. Andrew McCarthy and Peter Kirsanow strongly disagree. Interestingly, Paul Mirengoff of Powerline has concluded that the dismissal itself of the New Black Panther case may have been justified, though he takes no position on whether the dismissal itself was motivated by improper considerations of race. Scott Johnson of Powerline argues that it is the motivation that makes this a serious issue, and Hans Von Spakovsky, a voting rights expert, disagrees strongly with Paul's conclusion. It makes for fascinating reading. I include the links below:

Abigail Thernstrom - The New Black Panther Case: A Conservative Dissent

Andrew McCarthy - The Case Against the New Black Panthers (responding to Thernstrom)

Abigail Thernstrom - Yes, the Black Panther Case Is Small Potatoes (reply to McCarthy)

Peter Kirsanow - A Response to Thernstrom on the New Black Panther Case (H/T Instapundit)

Scott Johnson (Powerline) - The New Black Panther Party Case: Just Blow It

Paul Mirengoff (Powerline) - The New Black Panther Party Case: My Final(?) Look

Hans A. von Spakovsky - Dissenting with Paul Mirengoff: New Black Panther Case Should Not Have Been Dismissed

Paul Mirengoff (Powerline) - The New Black Panther Party Case: A Reply to Hans von Spakovsky

Read More...

Summary only...

Time To Dump Michael Steele

I have spent a tremendous amount of time on this blog taking the left to task for politicizing our foreign policy and prioritizing partisan advantage over our national security. The left has been, on this issue, utterly despicable and beneath contempt. Now, RNC Chariman Michael Steele has done the same, calling the war in Afghanistan "Obama's war" and labeling it "unwinable." To the credit of Republican Party (well, other than by the Republican Party's crazy Uncle, Ron Paul), no one else in federal office has taken that tack, nor should they. The reality is that we cannot afford to walk away from Afghanistan, the host country for al-Qaeda at the time of 9-11, without opening up a Pandora's box of negative consequences. As a threshold matter, one need only remember that it was the Soviet's loss in Afghanistan that put Islamic radicalism on steroids to begin with. Is there any reason why an American retreat from Afghanistan today would have any less of a disasterous effect in the long term?

Steele seems to be making about a major gaffe every month or two. But unlike his other gaffes, this one, on a matter of critical importance to our country, is unforgivable. Steele must go.

Read More...

Summary only...

True Politicization

How does one define "politicized?" Everyone likely remembers how the left cried "politicization" over the Bush Administration decision to can several Assistant AG's because they did not follow up on voting rights cases. But every administration prioritizes classes of cases that they want to see Justice pursue. What Bush did was nothing different. That certainly did not stop the left wing spin machine from howling "politicization." But if the word politicization is to have any meaning, it must be something more far more insidious than merely setting priorities. It must mean lawlessness, unequal application of the law, or falsifying facts for political reasons. And we are seeing numerous outrageous examples of it from within the bowels of the Obama and Clinton Administrations - as well as, of course, the MSM.

First there was Elena Kagan, currently undergoing hearings as Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court. When she worked in the Clinton White House, in an effort to justify Clinton's veto of a law banning partial birth abortion, she was involved in the alteration of an American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology report. ACOG could find no set of circumstances where late term partial birth abortion was necessary to preserve the health of the mother. But Kagan herself added the language 'the partial-birth-abortion procedure “may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.'" Read the whole story here and here. ACOG amazingly remained silent after the alteration and for years it went not merely unpublicized, but Kagan's language served as the basis for several court rulings. In short, Kagan was part of a major fraud involving the politicization of science.

Then there was Obama Interior Dept. which, a few weeks ago, convened a panel of experts on offshore oil drilling. At the conclusion of the panel, the Interior Dept. forwarded the experts a draft of a report for their approval. Only after receiving the expert's approval did the Interior Dept. insert into the final report the lie that these experts supported Obama's decision to impose a six month moratorium on offshore oil drilling. Fortunately these experts, unlike the AOGC, chose to immediately point out the falsity.

The above are casebook examples of the politicization of science. But then there is politicizing the administration of our laws. If former career Justice Dept. Attorney J. Christian Adams is to be believed, that is precisely what is occurring.

Obama, who promised to lead us into post-racial America, instead has saddled us with a Justice Dept. that uses race to determine whether or not to apply the law. To be more specific, if you are black and engaged in voter intimidation or voter fraud, you may well get a free pass from Obama's Justice Dept. Do see this entire interview:





If possible, even more outrageous is that the Justice Dept. has refused to respond to lawful subpoenas from the Office of the Civil Rights Division seeking to investigate DOJ's unequal enforcement of the laws based on racial preferences. Apparently, the Justice Dept. is not only engaged in unequal application of the law, but holds itself to be above the law.

All of this should be not merely front page news across the nation, but is of the ilk that the press should be harping on until guilty parties are held liable. It is not, of course, because the MSM itself is politicized. Take for example the recent exposure of Ezra Klein's invitation only Journolist-site which brought together some 400 left wing members of the press. This from Andrew Breitbart:

Ezra Klein’s “JournoList 400” is the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism. Now that collusion has been exposed when one of the weakest links in that cabal, Dave Weigel, was outed. Weigel was, in all likelihood, exposed because – to whoever the rat was who leaked his emails — he wasn’t liberal enough. . . .

I think we’ve seen a paradigm shift, and that the March 20 story will be remembered by conservatives as evidence of how the media accepts attacks on conservatives without due diligence. . . .

. . . The “JournoList” is the story: who was on it and which positions of journalistic power and authority do they hold? Now that the nature and the scope of the list has been exposed, I think the public has a right to know who shapes the big media narratives and how. . . .

As we already uncovered in our expose on the “Cry Wolf” project, members of academia and think tanks are actively working to form the narrative used by the press to thwart conservative messages. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the reporters on the listserv mimicked the talking points invented and agreed upon by the intellectuals who were invited to the virtual cocktail party that was Klein’s “JournoList.”

And let us not forget the participation of Media Matters in the larger picture of intimidation and mockery for any reporter, like Weigel, who dares stray from the one acceptable liberal narrative in the media. Flying its false flag as a “media watchdog,” the $10 million-or-so per year agitprop command center creates and promotes a system of conformity in which it relentlessly attacks anyone who strays from the Soros-funded party orthodoxy.

The deluge of intimidation showered upon the occasional heretic by Media Matters represent another distinct layer in the media infrastructure that ensures true believer liberals are overrepresented and conservatives had better watch their step.

The fact that 400 journalists did not recognize how wrong their collusion, however informal, was shows an enormous ethical blind spot toward the pretense of impartiality. As journalists actively participated in an online brainstorming session on how best to spin stories in favor of one party against another, they continued to cash their paychecks from their employers under the impression that they would report, not spin the agreed-upon “news” on behalf of their “JournoList” peers.

The American people, at least half of whom are the objects of scorn of this group of 400, deserve to know who was colluding against them so that in the future they can better understand how the once-objective media has come to be so corrupted and despised. . . .

So at any rate, if during the Bush years you were scratching your head wondering what the word "politicized" - a word splashing across your screen every few minutes - meant, well, now you have some real world examples to define the word for you. That is of course not the only difference between today and the Bush years. Today, you are hearing the word "politicized" a lot less, if at all. It must have fallen out of favor on Journolist.

Read More...

Summary only...

Democrat's Swamp Of Corruption

Pelosi said in the run up to the 2006 election that she wanted to "drain the swamp." Perhaps the only good things to come out of the elections in 2006 and 2008 have been that America is being treated to the full and unvarnished picture of just what, in so many ways, how utterly hypocritical that claim was. One of them deals with politicization of the Justice Dept. and the Democrats utter refusal to demand accountability.

During 2008, several armed thugs from the New Black Panthers showed up at a polling station. They were indicted on charges relating to voter intimidation and subsequently convicted, with the only element remaining being the sentencing. But Eric Holder's Justice Dept. decided to withdraw the charges. They have utterly refused to respond to questions - and subpoenas - in the aftermath. Democrats have circled the wagons to protect the Justice Dept. from having to answer for this travesty. This from the Washington Times:

In their bid to protect President Obama's liberal political appointees at the Justice Department, congressional Democrats are surrendering their responsibility to keep a presidential administration honest.

A Feb. 2 letter from Glenn A. Fine, inspector general for the Justice Department, to Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, ought to give pause to lawmakers of any party. In effect, the letter says there is no independent authority that can investigate any decision by the department to stonewall congressional inquiries. If the department refuses to answer congressional questions by asserting legal privileges that have never been recognized in U.S. history, the IG is powerless to assess allegations of certain sorts of departmental misconduct.

The letter from Mr. Fine explained why the IG says he is prohibited by law from reviewing whether the Justice Department or the White House allowed or instigated political interference in a decision to drop or reduce voter-intimidation charges against members of the New Black Panther Party. This means nearly a dozen separate requests from Mr. Wolf, Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican, and other legislators for Black Panther-related information can be stonewalled by the Justice Department, as can inquiries and even subpoenas from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In short, the department is saying that it can ignore Congress with impunity.

The House Judiciary Committee's Democrats, led by Chairman John Conyers of Michigan, voted on Jan. 13 to roll over like whipped puppies when presented with a resolution demanding answers from the Justice Department. On a 15-14 party-line vote, committee Democrats voted to look the other way rather than hold the department accountable to Congress. Seven other committee Democrats did not even have the courage to vote on the resolution. . . .

On Feb. 3, Mr. Smith wrote to Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli to ask - based on reports in The Washington Times - if he had had any discussions with White House staff in the course of deciding to drop the Black Panther case. This gets at the heart of political interference with the administration of justice that so concerned Mr. Conyers in 2008. The Judiciary chairman needs to remember why accountability matters and back Mr. Smith's right to have answers.

Democrats have not drained the swamp. They've filled it to overflowing.

Read More...

Summary only...

The Changing National Security Tune

Now, do [terrorists] deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not.

President Barack Obama, Interview With 60 Minutes, 23 March 2009

HOLDER: Yes, it seems to me this is an argument that is really consequential. One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.

It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohammed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not.

And yet, I understand what Secretary Powell is concerned about, and that is we're going to be fighting this war with people who are special forces, not people who are generally in uniform. And if unfortunately they somehow become detained, we would want them to be treated in an appropriate way consistent with the Geneva Convention.

ZAHN: So is the secretary of state walking a fine line here legally? He is not asking that the United States declare these men as prisoners of war right now. He's just saying let's abide by the Geneva Convention in the meantime.

HOLDER: Yes, and I think in a lot of ways that makes sense. I think they clearly do not fit within the prescriptions of the Geneva Convention. You have to remember that after World War II, as these protocols were being developed, there seemed to be widespread agreement that members of the French Resistance would not be considered prisoners of war if they had been captured. That being the case, it's hard for me to see how members of al Qaeda could be considered prisoners of war.

And yet, I understand Secretary Powell's concerns. We want to make sure that our forces, if captured in this or some other conflict, are treated in a humane way. And I think ultimately that's really the decisive factor here. How are people, who are in our custody, going to be treated? And those in Europe and other places who are concerned about the treatment of al Qaeda members should come to Camp X-ray and see how the people are, in fact, being treated.

ZAHN: The administration this morning playing down any discord among its team, but if you could, help us understand how you reconcile this.

HOLDER: . . . I can understand the tensions that exist, but I think the way to resolve it is, in fact, the way Secretary Powell has proposed, which is to say these are not people who are prisoners of war as that has been defined, but who are entitled to, in our own interests, entitled to be treated in a very humane way and almost consistent with all of the dictates of the Geneva Convention.

ZAHN: Final question for you, moving onto the issue of John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban. How much pressure should they put on this man to get information out of him as they interrogate him?

HOLDER: Well, I mean, it's hard to interrogate him at this point now that he has a lawyer and now that he is here in the United States. But to the extent that we can get information from him, I think we should. . . .

Eric Holder, Interview with CNN, 28 January 2002

From the quotes above, we have Obama saying that we should not be treating terrorists as criminals. We have Eric Holder, now and for the moment our Attorney General, not merely acknowledging that giving a terrorist a lawyer and Constitutional rights significantly constrains our ability to interrogate that person, but arguing that "enemy combatants" shouldn't be treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention because that too would substantially constrain our ability to interrogate them for vital intelligence. How we get from those statements to today, where Holder and Obama are treating the Christmas Day Undiebomber, Abdullahmuttalab ,as a common criminal, is literally the story of how the far left demagogued and politicized our national security over the past six years.

Intelligence is time sensitive. Information on locations and practices that are true today will be changed tomorrow if the enemy has reason to believe that either has been compromised. Thus, when the Obama administration decided to treat the Christmas Undiebomber as common criminal and give him a lawyer after less than an hour of interrogation, they voluntarily squandered an intelligence asset with information vital to protecting American lives. Abdulmutallab thereafter remained silent for five weeks until he began to answer questions again. While Abdullmutalab may be providing high value intelligence today, it is an utter certainty that, with a five week delay, the value of the intelligence Abdullmutalab can convey is significantly lessened.

Yet the Obama and Holder are trying to defend their indefensible decision to treat Abdullmutulab as a common criminal for purely political reasons. The administration is in full spin mode now - thus the BS meter at the top of this post is pegging.

The administration called a press briefing Tuesday to publicly announce that, after weeks of silence, the FBI had finally induced Abdulmutallab to begin providing intelligence again, apparently involving his family in the process. The purpose of the announcement was "to let Americans 'know that we're doing everything possible to keep the American people safe." and to condemn Republicans for "politicizing" the issue. Amazing. And as an aside, no one has yet asked the question if there are any additional plea agreements that had to be first agreed to by the government before Abdulmutallab agreed now to answer questions. You can bet your life's savings that ink met paper before his lawyer allowed him to say word one, whether his parents were there or not.

The administration followed up the news conference with a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder to House Minority Leader Mitch McConnel in which Holder attempts to justify treating Abdulmutallab as a common criminal rather than an enemy combatant. The main reason he gives for not holding Abdulmutallab:

Some have argued that had Abdulmutallab been declared an enemy combatant, the government could have held him indefinitely without providing him access to an attorney. But the government’s legal authority to do so is far from clear. In fact, when the Bush administration attempted to deny Jose Padilla access to an attorney, a federal judge in New York rejected that position, ruling that Padilla must be allowed to meet with his lawyer. Notably, the judge in that case was Michael Mukasey, my predecessor. . . .

Give me a break. As a threshold matter, Padilla was allowed to see a lawyer to challenge his designation as an enemy combatant - not because he was a criminal defendant with a right not to answer questions during the period in which he was being interrogated for intelligence. And if Holder switched on PBS News last night, he would have been treated to Michael Mukasey arguing that Abdullumutalab is an enemy combatant who should have been put in the military system without benefit of a lawyer or a Constitutional right not to answer questions.

More importantly, the "legal authority" to hold Abdulmutallab as an enemy combatant without Constitutional rights could not be more clear. We are a nation at war against those elements that carried out or otherwise assisted in the Sept. 11 attack. This war was formally authorized in 2001 by Congress in the Authorization For Use Of Military Force (AUMF). What the Undiebomber did in attempting to blow up a plane was an act of war that falls specifically within the ambit of the AUMF. Thus we have every right to hold him in our military system. Even the left wing of the Supreme Court never questioned that right. To the contrary, taking prisoners in war and holding them within the military system until hostilities cease is, to quote the left wing of the Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, "so fundamental and accepted an incident to war as to be an exercise of the ‘necessary and appropriate force."

Indeed, so utterly groundless is Holder's claims that even Jan Crawford of CBS News isn't buying it.

. . . Aware of needed damage control, the White House and Attorney General are now taking the position that, legally, it was “highly questionable” whether they could have detained the terror suspect and continued to question him without a lawyer, even if they wanted to. Holder, in his letter to the Senators, said that legal authority “is far from clear.”

Many legal experts, however, agree the law is, in fact, pretty clear: It’s not that highly questionable at all. Under existing law, the Obama Administration had the authority to detain and question Abdulmutallab more extensively. And it chose not to.

If the Obama Administration wants to make a policy decision to treat al Qaeda operatives as common criminals and not as enemy combatants, that’s a position it could take—and some advocate they should. They’ve argued that giving rights to these terrorists, for example, will enhance our standing in the world and deter future terrorist acts.

But those are policy arguments and policy decisions, and they have consequences. They should stand or fall on the merits. They aren’t required by law.
To argue, instead, that the law essentially tied has their hands—that the law all but required this course of action in Detroit--ignores the cases that have been decided.

And there’s a danger in that. Whether or not the Obama Administration made the right call on Christmas Day, it’s a problem to see top officials now make incomplete or misleading legal arguments to justify their decision after the fact.

Holder also makes a laughable pragmatic argument that using the criminal law system is somehow the equal of - if not superior to - interrogations without constitutional rights and a lawyer under the law of war. The Volokh Conspiracy responds to that argument:

Do we think that maybe using the model of ordinary criminal justice questioning and plea bargaining and lawyer negotiation is such a smart idea at a moment in which we have to wonder whether, yes indeed, maybe this guy really does know something crucial? Talk about maximum hold-up value ...

I’m all in favor of such criminal justice rights for our ordinary criminals — and am not silly enough to believe that people like me want them because they will cause people to talk. It’s in order that in our ordinary criminal justice system, people will know they don’t have to and, frankly, won’t without advice from an attorney. I like that for ordinary criminal suspects, but that’s because it’s a limitation. AG Holder makes it sound as though it’s a great way to get them to talk. If it were, I’d think there was something wrong with our existing criminal justice system. It’s a feature of our ordinary criminal justice system; a bug if we think it’s supposed to produce actionable intelligence quickly. DOJ seems to think it’s a feature all the way around; this is unlikely at best.

We Mirandized him ... because otherwise we’d be depriving ourselves of an important tool for gaining actionable intelligence? By urging him not to talk? Really? That appears to be the AG’s argument, on this as on the general point about using the criminal justice system. If we don’t use a tool that is mostly, by comparison to our other possibilities, about limiting our access to him, we are somehow hurting ourselves by not using our full repertoire.

Well, it’s an argument, I suppose. An admirable example, I also suppose, of how to make a legal silk purse from a sow’s ear. I sure hope whoever got stuck writing it at DOJ doesn’t take it too seriously. The whole letter sounds as though it were cut and pasted from some human rights advocacy report, I’m afraid.

Obama and Holder, prior to taking power, had it right. Abdulmutallab should be treated as an enemy combatant. That is what our national security demands and the law allows. It is only politics that is driving Holder and Obama to do otherwise at the moment. If they think that they can keep this up, they had better be hoping and praying to a benevolent God that al Qaeda does not successfully conduct a mass casualty attack in America on their watch. If and when it happens, the public will be demanding their blood.

Read More...

Summary only...

More Criticism of the NIE on Iran's Nuclear Weapons Program

John Bolton, writing in the Washington Post, is highly critical of the recent NIE on grounds that echo what others have already identified as glaring inadequacies, including the problem of politicization and the "wilfull blindness" exhibited by the NIE's authors concerning Iran's decision to halt its nuclear weapon's program contemporaneous with the U.S. and U.K. invasion of Iraq. Bolton adds some key details that raise further concerns with the NIE and, equally, how our intelligence community is functioning today:

. . . Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.

Consider these flaws in the NIE's "key judgments," . . .

First, the headline finding -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout."

The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.

Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of "intelligence."

Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. . . . The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was "possible" but not "likely" that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from -- of all places -- an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that "we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.

Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. . . .

Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as "intelligence judgments."
That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this "intelligence" torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.

Read the entire article here. Unfortunately, the Democrats' BDS must be included in the mix of how this flawed NIE was able to emerge. In the wake of 9-11, Democrats have made it a cornerstone of their parnoia that Bush was responsible for the twisting of intelligence. Rather than question the NIE before its release in the instant case, Bush appears to have tried to forestall criticism in this instance by not questioning any part of the NIE and simply released it. And thus we are left with a deeply flawed product with extreme ramifications.

Read More...

Summary only...