Stygius

Fred Fleitz at work

Carrying the Dick Cheney-John Bolton standard to the committee work of the US House, Frederick Fleitz is staffing for the House Intelligence Comittee. Fleitz is busily writing bunk reports, according to Dafna Linzer:

The report's author, Fredrick Fleitz, is a onetime CIA officer and special assistant to John R. Bolton, the administration's former point man on Iran at the State Department. Bolton, who is now ambassador to the United Nations, had been highly influential during President Bush's first term in drawing up a tough policy that rejected talks with Tehran.

Showing they have no concern about their own credibility, and the harm to the United States' credibility, they are at it again.

Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate.

The report is such crap they couldn't even take it in front of the committee for review, but had to end-run it around the Democrats.

Among the allegations in Fleitz's Iran report is that ElBaradei removed a senior inspector from the Iran investigation because he raised "concerns about Iranian deception regarding its nuclear program." The agency said the inspector has not been removed.

Not many chances left, folks

Several times in the past, I've encouraged readers to get the free DVD, Last Best Chance.

I do so again, in the context of this New York Times article:

Undercover Congressional investigators successfully smuggled into the United States enough radioactive material to make two dirty bombs, even after it set off alarms on radiation detectors installed at border checkpoints, a new report says.

But investigators bluffed their way into the country:

In the test case, undercover investigators bought a small amount of radioactive material, most likely cesium. Then on Dec. 15, they drove across the border at undisclosed locations from Canada and Mexico, intentionally picking spots where the detection equipment had been installed.

The alarms went off in both locations, and the investigators were pulled aside for questioning. In both cases, they showed the agents from the Customs and Border Protection agency forged import licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, based on an image of the real document they found on the Internet.

The GAO's 12-page report is in PDF here. Investigators penetrated both a US-Canada crossing, and a US-Mexico crossing.

 

Iran, intelligence cred, and the IAEA

Laura Rozen points to an LA Times piece on the International Atomic Energy Agency's role in developing and distributing intelligence on Iran's nuclear program. Point being, after the US Government, self-righteously of course, flushed its credibility down the toilet over the Iraq invasion, what to do when a rogue state actually does fire up an ambitious nuclear program?

In stark contrast to U.S. allegations against Iraq three years ago that were based on secret intelligence, today's suspicions about Iranian nuclear ambitions draw on evidence made public by a U.N. agency, the same one that found no case against Saddam Hussein.

The information appears in a series of reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' nuclear monitoring arm, whose latest assessment of the material is due out early this week. The IAEA has credibility internationally as an impartial analyst, which may explain the greater consensus in the world community about the need for a concerted response to Iran.

"Since Iraq, who's going to believe intelligence? Who is going to believe anybody but a neutral agency?" said Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy, the Egyptian ambassador to Austria and a vice chair of the IAEA board of governors.

U.S. officials agree that the agency's role on Iran has been crucial.

Which leads one to the conclusion that the Bush Administration ought to be grateful its attempt to bully and hamstring the IAEA, thereby "reforming" it into one more extension of its public relations apparatus, backfired. Good thing they put John Bolton on the job, no?

Recently, the administration has been painfully learning the consequences of abusing trust. However, it will probably require some more lessons for it to sink in.

Driving away expertise

One of the most deeply unsettling patterns of the Bush Administration is government experts' tendency to abandon it to its fate. This is troublesome not just for the obvious problem of politicization, but for the gaping hole left in government's institutional memory when career experts are driven out. That this is done for reasons of ideological paranoia only gives shape to the travesty, the consequence is the collapse of good governance, as the leadership is no longer able to draw on the professional experience and capability that lays underneath the policy making process. Not that they care, since experts and scientists throughout the government are being censored or intimidated regularly.

Ultimately, what we are left with is the blind leading the blind. And we see this happening with FEMA, Veterans Affairs, the Justice Department, NASA and NOAA. Counterterrorism agencies have seen a worrisomely high turnover as well. And now -- Lord help us -- it is the State Department proliferation experts. Swell.

I meant to post on this Knight Ridder piece days ago (but Jeffrey Lewis reminds). To echo his point, we are seeing the legacy of John Bolton at work here, and longtime readers who've subjected themselves to my various Bolton rants will know how.

State Department officials appointed by President Bush have sidelined key career weapons experts and replaced them with less experienced political operatives who share the White House and Pentagon's distrust of international negotiations and treaties.

And it is this ideological commitment that is of more consequence that results.

The reorganization was conducted largely in secret by a panel of four political appointees. A career expert was allowed to join the group only after most decisions had been made. Its work was overseen by Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer who was detailed to the State Department as senior adviser to former Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a critic of arms agreements and international organizations.

I'm shocked Mr. Fleitz is still lurking around State, and is apparently wielding more influence than ever before.

Jonathan Granoff, the director of the Global Security Institute, an arms control advocacy group, said the loss of State Department arms-control expertise was especially worrisome because the only mechanism for verifying U.S. and Russian nuclear arms cuts - the 1991 START I treaty - is due to expire in less than three years.

That also will eliminate the most effective way of verifying that the former rivals are abiding by their Non-Proliferation Treaty commitments to eliminate their nuclear arsenals eventually, he said. "Rather than nurture our experts, the administration seems to have brought in neophytes without a passion for progress in this field and, worse, undermined the international institutions that are most effective in stopping proliferation," he said.

Secretary Rice doesn't seem engaged on these issues. Unfortunately, it will be she that suffers in the end.

The cronyism that gave us Michael Brown is alive and well, and thriving at all levels of the Federal Government.

Iran 'referred' by IAEA

The IAEA page on this has the resolution and pertinent accompanying documents. Keep in mind that "reporting" Iran to the UN Security Council and "referring" it are qualitatively different things, and represents to Iran breathing space.

Bloomberg:

The United Nations nuclear agency voted to refer Iran to the Security Council over a nuclear program other countries fear is a cover for making weapons. Iran said in response it would resume work to enrich uranium.

The vote was 27-3, and the near-unanimity represents a success for the the United States and the EU-3, although Iran will be calculating that any UNSC effort will be long drawn out and will issue a wobbly result.

Today's resolution calls on Iran stop uranium enrichment- related activities, to open military sites to UN inspectors and account for documents related to the procurement of machinery and equipment for its nuclear program. Iran was found in ``non- compliance'' with its treaty obligations by the IAEA board of governors in September.

Iran will resume the "industrial enrichment" of uranium as its diplomatic response.

And gold is up.

US drops nuke bunker buster

Via mini-prak, surprising news:

The Bush administration has abandoned research into a nuclear "bunker-buster" warhead, deciding instead to pursue a similar device using conventional weaponry, a key Republican senator said Tuesday.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said funding for the nuclear bunker-buster as part of the Energy Department's fiscal 2006 budget has been dropped at the department's request.

The nuclear bunker-buster had been the focus of intense debate in Congress, with opponents arguing that its development as a tactical nuclear weapon could add to nuclear proliferation.

That this was sunk in such a preliminary stage -- we hadn't even gotten to proper design funding yet -- surprises me all the more. It looks like an initial (and piddly) $4 million which was approved by Congress' appropriation for the Department of Energy was stripped out in conference committee with no protest from the administration.

The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator -- or RNEP -- seemed to have strong Pentagon and vice presidential support, along with a core of hardliners and loyalists in the Congress to back it. (See this Wikipedia backgrounder on the proposed weapon.)

It's possible that the spreading realization that an RNEP strike not only increased the probability of its offensive use -- a radical transformation from a deterrent nuclear posture -- but that the weapon would do nothing to contain radiation underground made it a political nonstarter in the end.

The Last Best Chance

While I ruefully admit that this blog has increasingly become a platform for my partisan hackery -- when I've always wanted it to be a more analytically-focused page -- self-imposed time constraints on blogging limit what I can produce. And the various outrages and sarcasms are easier to gin up and dispense on short notice.

One regret is that I don't focus more on terrorism and proliferation -- and the need to come up with a results-focused, de-politicized/bipartisan counterproliferation scheme -- a drum I beat continually during during the opposition to the John Bolton UN nomination. It is widely agreed to be the most pervasive threat to the United States, and yet policy-wise it seems we are still groping around in the darkness as various neo-Reaganite ideologues more obsessed with castrating effective counterproliferation programs like Nunn-Lugar impede policy. From the people that matter, there is a stunning lack of leadership on this issue.

Now, Sam Nunn's Nuclear Threat Initiative is turning from their usual wonkery in the halls of power to appealing directly to Americans with their short "docu-drama," Last Best Chance. While HBO will be showing it October 17, anyone can order the DVD for free, something I just did. (And hey, why not read some Graham Allison while you're at it.)

John Aloysius Farrell writes:

The docu-drama is short. It runs 30 minutes. But it sure made the crowd at the Four Seasons Hotel put down their salad forks and stilled their chatter. You can see it yourself when it debuts on HBO Monday night. Or order a free DVD online at www.lastbestchance.org.

Actor-politician Fred Thompson, of U.S. Senate and "Law & Order" fame, plays a president whose administration discovers that al-Qaeda is acquiring nuclear weaponry.

As Thompson and his Russian counterpart struggle to foil the attack, corrupt officials in Russia, Belarus and South Africa supply Islamic terrorists with warheads or weapons-grade nuclear fuel from poorly guarded arsenals and laboratories.

"So ... America Hiroshima begins," says a bad guy in the film.

Given Osama bin Laden's stated desire to acquire a nuclear weapons and inflict just this "American Hiroshima" on us, I hope that every Stygius reader visits the film's site, orders the free DVD, watches it, and then passes it on. I also urge fellow bloggers to post on the film, and -- more importantly -- on this topic, while urging their readers to do likewise.

Sleepwalking on WMD

Hat tip here to Armchair Generalist.

The Senate Democrats' website is hosting the National Security Advisory Group memo, "Worst Weapons in the Worst Hands" (pdf), subtitled, "US Inaction on the Nuclear Terror Threat Since 9/11, and a Path of Action."

It's chaired by former Secretary of Defense William Perry. (All of the Democratic foreign policy luminaries -- such as they are -- are on its board. Frankly, we could do without Sandy Berger and I'm not an Albright fan, but let's make lemonade.)

It's set out in a nice, concise outline format, which would make paraphrasing it redundant. But it makes the case that, given that the nuclear terrorism threat is acknowledged by everyone to be the most serious security threat, the Bush Administration has been paralyzed on doing much about it. It's a nice briefer for potential Democratic candidates who want to get up to speed on WMD threats, and smart pragmatic solutions that the administration has consistently avoided or even thwarted. It's also very much a realist document, countenancing decreasing Russian democracy and things like that.

And the contrasts with administration policies or non-policies are immediately evident. Particularly key is nurturing the US-Russian non-proliferation partnership that John Bolton tried to sabotage and that the White House has never made a priority. A global strategy to stopping or constraining fissile material production, versus the sabotage of the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty and a total absence of any non-proliferation policy beyond half-heartedly fulfilling American obligations set by previous administrations.

Killing the FMCT

The "trust, but don't verify" anti-arms control clique in the Bush Administration has been killing the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty softly for some time now. The FMCT tries to control the spread of fissile material to keep it out of terrorists' hands. I wrote on it in July 2004, actually. Also see an old FUGOP post. John Bolton was instrumental to this cause.

Now, Wade Boese brings us up to speed in The American Prospect.

Bush allowing India civilian nuke tech

The Washington Post reports on the Bush Administration's concession to India to try and override legislation banning nuclear technology sales to countries that don't accede to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The US is trying to get cozy with India as Russia and China attempt to do the same. The administration hopes India to keep wedges in between China and India, which prevents Asia from consolidating under an anti-US bloc. Would it have been better to spend a year convincing them to sign on to the NPT? I'm not sure, but I tend to think we may have given away a bit much.

Under the terms of the deal, India agreed to place its civilian nuclear facilities -- but not its nuclear weapons arsenal -- under international monitoring and pledged to continue to honor a ban on nuclear testing. In return, it would have access, for the first time, to conventionalweapons systems and to sensitive U.S. nuclear technology that can be used in either a civilian or a military program. It could also free India to buy the long-sought-after Arrow Missile System developed by Israel with U.S. technology.

The agreement does not call for India to cease production of weapons-grade plutonium, which enables India to expand its nuclear arsenal.

Also, selling civilian reactors to India is a great money-maker for US industry, especially one with no domestic builds being undertaken and stiff competition from Canadian and European companies.