The idiocy of the NIE continues to reverberate through the media and blogs. Major points about the NIE include the fact it was not a consensus of the intel community and there are dissenters in the career analyst corps who disagree with the key finding of moderate confidence – like the conclusion Iran continues to suspend its weapon design program. It also attempts to play the same shell game all rogue states play by assuming any program labeled ‘civilian’ cannot possibly be a cover for an illegals weapons program. Nah, how could that be?

Apparently the Three Amigos Of State who pushed this propaganda act through did not have the intelligence (pun intended – most definitely) to know that the men running Iran’s ‘civilian’ nuclear program are all Commanders and leaders from Iran’s military units:

Twenty-one commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps are the top scientists running Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program, says the man who exposed Iran’s nuclear weapons program in 2002.

On top of that, the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate published last week saying Tehran shut down its weaponization program in 2003 failed to mention that the program restarted in mid-2004, said Alireza Jafarzadeh, an Iranian dissident and president of Strategic Policy Consulting.

The scientists working on the alleged civilian nuclear centrifuge program are IGRC commanders, said Jafarzadeh, who was providing a list of names to the press on Tuesday. But their intention is not a nuclear energy source for civilians.

“It’s the IRGC that is basically controlling the whole thing, dominating the whole thing,” Jafarzadeh told FOXNews.com. “They are running the show. They have a number of sites controlled by the IRGC that has been off-limits to the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and inspectors, including a military university known as Imam Hossein University. … That site has not been inspected. They have perhaps the most advanced nuclear research and development center in that university.”

This intelligence comes from the very group which exposed the hidden Iranian nuclear program to the myopic US intelligence community just a few short years ago. You would think the IC would listen to the one group that has already proven how blind the IC is to Iran’s intentions? Maybe it’s a jealousy thing, the reason why this information is not folded into the NIE on Iran. Or is this the smoking gun revelation that gave the finding only moderate confidence that Iran has abandoned its weapons program?

In my first post on this matter I noted the NIE contained only three levels of confidence: high, medium and low. That means all conclusions can only fall into these categories (classic government binning). Despite the fancy names I noted what these really mean:

They basically fall into (1) Highly probably but small chance it could be wrong; (2) Who the hell knows, its possible and some hints are there; and (3) Not likely.

That’s it folks – everything must fall into those three buckets. Want another way to look at it? High is 90-100% confidence (or probability). Low is 0-10% confidence – it has to be the antithesis of one. Moderate = everything else and basically means 50-50. So the moderate confidence is just wild ass guessing – a WAG.

The reason this NIE is clearly a fraud is not just all the contradictory information it ignores, it is the clear statement of policy instead of a finding of fact that an NIE is meant to address. It is not meant to promote a policy by cherry picking data – clearly what someone has done here as noted by Bret Stephens in the WSJ:

But the NIE’s real purpose becomes clear in the next sentence, when it states that Iran’s behavior “suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige and goals for regional influence in other ways, might–if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible–prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program.”

This is a policy prescription, not an intelligence assessment.

It is a disaster is what it is. By isolating the question down to one weapon design program to fit a nuke warhead on a missile the NIE led all sorts of gullible people to assume Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons. It really is a crime to misuse a government office to promote falsehoods for political gain. So I am still trying figure out if we have Three Amigos stumbling and bumbling their way into legal jeopardy or if this is some exquisite rope-a-dope move to get Iran to come clean. Sadly I think it is the former since all the energy to use sanctions to make Iran come clean has dissipated in the wake of this disaster.

We shall see, but if anyone doubts the civilian nuclear power program Iran is pursuing, against ALL cost-benefit analyses, is not a military program in disguise when most of the program’s leaders are military then they have no business in the debate. They would be what could be called suicidal and a danger themselves and all around them.