Abolish the CIADestroying the interrogation tapes amounts to mutiny and
treason.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Dec. 10, 2007, at 12:09 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.

It seems flabbergastingly improbable that President George W. Bush
learned of the National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iranian nuclear
ambitions only a few days before the rest of us did, but the haplessness
of his demeanor suggested that he might, in fact, have been telling the
truth. After all, had the administration known for any appreciable length
of time that the mullahs had hit the pause button on their program in
late 2003, it would have been in a position to make a claim that is quite
probably true, namely, that our overthrow of Saddam Hussein had impressed
the Iranians in much the same way as it impressed the Libyans and made
them at least reconsider their willingness to continue flouting the Non-
Proliferation Treaty. (Given that the examination of the immense Libyan
stockpile also disclosed the fingerprints that led back to the exposure
of the A.Q. Khan nuke-mart in Pakistan, the removal of Saddam from the
chessboard has had more effect in curbing the outlaw WMD business than it
is normally given credit for.)

Nobody seems entirely sure what caused our intelligence agencies to
reverse their opinion, but it seems rather likely that the defection
and/or abduction of Brig. Gen. Ali Reza Asgari, Iran's former deputy
minister of defense, in February of this year, has something to do with
it. Asgari's ostensibly principal job had been that of liaison with
Hezbollah in Lebanon, but his debriefing could also have helped confirm
pre-existing surmises about Iran's reining-in of its nuclear ambitions.

Which is the most that can be said about those ambitions. It is
completely false for anybody to claim, on the basis of this admitted
"estimate," that Iran has ceased to be a candidate member of the
fatuously named nuclear "club." It has the desire to acquire the
weaponry, it retains the means to do so, and it has been caught lying and
cheating about the process. If it suspended some overtly military
elements of the project out of a justifiable apprehension in 2003, it has
energetically persisted in the implicit aspects-most notably the
installation of gas centrifuges at the plant in Natanz and the building
of a heavy water reactor at Arak. All that the estimate has done is to
define weaponry down and to suggest a distinction without much difference
between a "civilian" and a "military" dimension of the same program. The
acquisition of enriched uranium and of plutonium, for any purpose, is
identical with the acquisition of a thermonuclear weapons capacity. Iran
continues to strive to produce both, neither of which, as it happens, are
required for its ostensible civilian energy needs.

The briefing that I was given by the British Embassy in Tehran in 2005,
showing the howlingly glaring discrepancy between what Iran claims and
what Iran does, is not in the least challenged by the most recent
conclusions. To say that Iran has "stopped" rather than paused its
program is to offer an opinion, not to present a finding. (For more on
this, see the excellent article by Valerie Lincy and Gary Milhollin in
the Dec. 6 New York Times, and also Jonathan Schell's Dec. 9 piece on the
Guardian's Web site.) The mullahs are steadily amassing the uranium and
plutonium ingredients of a weapon and will indeed soon be able to pause,
along with other countries, like Japan, at the point where only a brief
interlude and a swift spurt of effort would put them in full possession
of the bomb.

Why, then, have our intelligence agencies helped to give the lying
Iranian theocracy the appearance of a clean bill, while simultaneously
and publicly (and with barely concealed relish) embarrassing the
president and crippling his policy? It is not just a hypothetical strike
on Iran that is rendered near-impossible by this estimate, but also the
likelihood of any concerted diplomatic or economic pressure, as well. The
policy of getting the United Nations to adopt sanctions on the regime,
which was about to garner the crucial votes, can now be regarded as
clinically dead. A fine day's work by those who claim to guard us while
we sleep.

One explanation is that, like Mark Twain's cat, which having sat on a hot
stove would never afterward sit on a cold one, the CIA has adopted a
policy of caution to make up for its "slam-dunk" embarrassment over Iraq.
This is a superficially plausible hypothesis, which ignores the fact that
for most of the duration of the Iraq debate, the CIA was all but openly
hostile to any argument for regime-change in Baghdad. This hostility
extended all the way from a frenzied attempt to discredit Ahmad Chalabi
and the Iraqi National Congress, to the Plame/Wilson imbroglio, and the
agency's "referral" of Robert Novak's disclosure to the Department of
Justice. Interagency hostility in Washington, D.C., between the CIA and
the Department of Defense has never been so damaging to any
administration, let alone to any administration in time of war, as it has
been to this one.

And now we have further confirmation of the astonishing culture of
lawlessness and insubordination that continues to prevail at the highest
levels in Langley. At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting
important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and
at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch
and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official
of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence.
This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason. Despite
a string of exposures going back all the way to the Church Commission,
the CIA cannot rid itself of the impression that it has the right to
subvert the democratic process both abroad and at home. Its criminality
and arrogance could perhaps have been partially excused if it had ever
got anything right, but, from predicting the indefinite survival of the
Soviet Union to denying that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait,
our spymasters have a Clouseau-like record, one that they have earned yet
again with their exculpation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was after the
grotesque estimate of continued Soviet health and prosperity that the
late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the CIA should be
abolished. It is high time for his proposal to be revived. The system is
worse than useless-it's a positive menace. We need to shut the whole
thing down and start again.

--
Fred Stone
aa# 1369
If you go into Sudan today; Your heart will fill with dread
If you go into Sudan today; You might just lose your head

Because on the sands; With blood on their hands
Every nut that ever was; Will be there because
Today's the day the Teddy Bears; Have their Jihad!

We need to shut the whole
thing down and start again.

Abolish the CIADestroying the interrogation tapes amounts to mutiny and
treason.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Dec. 10, 2007, at 12:09 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.

It seems flabbergastingly improbable that President George W. Bush
learned of the National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iranian nuclear
ambitions only a few days before the rest of us did, but the haplessness
of his demeanor suggested that he might, in fact, have been telling the
truth. After all, had the administration known for any appreciable length
of time that the mullahs had hit the pause button on their program in
late 2003, it would have been in a position to make a claim that is quite
probably true, namely, that our overthrow of Saddam Hussein had impressed
the Iranians in much the same way as it impressed the Libyans and made
them at least reconsider their willingness to continue flouting the Non-
Proliferation Treaty.

(Given that the examination of the immense Libyan
stockpile also disclosed the fingerprints that led back to the exposure
of the A.Q. Khan nuke-mart in Pakistan, the removal of Saddam from the
chessboard has had more effect in curbing the outlaw WMD business than it
is normally given credit for.)

Nobody seems entirely sure what caused our intelligence agencies to
reverse their opinion,