Nuke the Messenger: The New York Times vs. The Iran NIE

[McCamy Taylor]

If only this was a black and white world, it would be a lot easier to decide whom to trust. A New York Times reporter who regularly breaks stories about the crimes of a secretive US government agency must be good, correct? But what about a reporter who serves as a mouthpiece of those who attempt to discredit US intelligence agencies which exercise caution in judging the nuclear ambitions of Iran? And what if the same journalist applauds the intelligence estimates of Israelis who claim to have determined that the Syrian site recently bombed in that country was definitely nuclear---and who writes that Condi Rice is thinking about her own legacy, not US security when she talks negotiations, not war? What kind of reporter is that?



http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07EFDD1F3BF937A35751C1A9619C8B63

On Dec. 4, 2007 New York Times reporter Mark Mazettii wrote that the US intelligence community had finally released its NIE about Iran, declaring its opinion that the country no longer sought to develop nuclear weapons. The story rocketed to front page news. Ding dong, the threat of another war is dead could be heard across the land. Democrats celebrated, because the Republicans had lost their only campaign issue for 2008.

On Dec. 7, 2007 New York Times reporter Mark Mazetti knocked the NIE story off the front page---and handed its opponents ammunition to attack it---by threatening to publish a story about how the CIA destroyed two torture tapes in 2005. The CIA’s current director, Hayden, came forward and disclosed the incident to the public. Mazetti published his scoop, without revealing his source or how long the NYT had known about the story.

What we do know is that in the days that followed Mazetti’s story, a carefully orchestrated propaganda action occurred, one which I have documented in my journals “Smoke In Our Eyes” and “Smoke in Our Eyes II”. It was not an especially original or clever plan. I was able to predict what would be written---1. The NIE document must be a pack of lies, because the CIA was guilty of obstruction of justice to protect its reputation and 2. Torture had been approved by Democrats as well as Republicans, making it a bipartisan issue, therefore the only criminal charges that could ever be brought in the matter were against the CIA for the cover up, not the crime itself. Within 24 hours, the New York Times and the Washington Post had editorials by Tim Weiner and Jim Hoagland making exactly the connection between the NIE and the Two Torture Tape Story which I predicted. And the WaPo had its big “Pelosi Knew” headline. The Free Republic, CBS and FOX also helped propel the story of the untrustworthy CIA. Meanwhile, the news media which tends not to dispense White House propaganda—McClatchy, the LA Times, the Guardian---had editorials affirming the importance of the NIE, even after the Two Destroyed Tapes story.

Today, now that the furor has died down, I decided to search back in time, to see how long Mark Mazzetti has been a critic of the US intelligence community, since Mazzetti is the lynchpin in this latest media skirmish. Turns out, he has been bashing spies ever since he joined the New York Times way back in 2006.

This story, from Oct. 7, 2006 caught my eye. This is just a little over a year ago. The Cheney-CIA tug of war over what to say in the NIE should have been well underway. It is a funny little story. Mazzetti accuses the CIA of being such a bunch of Three Stooges that back in 1997, they predicted that North Korea would be bankrupt in 5 years. Tee hee hee.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/27/world/asia/27intel.html

Sort of a funny story for the NYT, but hey, watchdog journalism is good. Unless you accuse the people you are watching of stuff they didn’t do or say. What are those two big paragraphs of retraction doing down there at the bottom of this short column?

An article and headline on Oct. 27 about an intelligence assessment on North Korea misstated the nature of conclusions reached by a panel of specialists convened in 1997 by the Central Intelligence Agency.

There is more. Much more. Almost as much as there is in the article.

Going way back in time, the recent NIE was not the first effort by the nation’s intelligence community to suggest that Iran is not building a nuke. In April of 2006, Negroponte dared to suggest the same. Congress, which was in the control of Republicans, was not amused, as Mazzetti records

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/24/washington/24intel.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 — Some senior Bush administration officials and top Republican lawmakers are voicing anger that American spy agencies have not issued more ominous warnings about the threats that they say Iran presents to the United States.
Snip
The new report, from the House Intelligence Committee, led by Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, portrayed Iran as a growing threat and criticized American spy agencies for cautious assessments about Iran’s weapons programs. “Intelligence community managers and analysts must provide their best analytical judgments about Iranian W.M.D. programs and not shy away from provocative conclusions or bury disagreements in consensus assessments,” the report said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction like nuclear arms.
Snip
“We’re not in a court of law,” he said. “When they say there is ‘no evidence,’ you have to ask them what they mean, what is the meaning of the term ‘evidence’?”
snip
The consensus of the intelligence agencies is that Iran is still years away from building a nuclear weapon. Such an assessment angers some in Washington, who say that it ignores the prospect that Iran could be aided by current nuclear powers like North Korea. “When the intelligence community says Iran is 5 to 10 years away from a nuclear weapon, I ask: ‘If North Korea were to ship them a nuke tomorrow, how close would they be then?” said Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives.
“The intelligence community is dedicated to predicting the least dangerous world possible,” he said.

Wow. That is the same argument that we heard this weekend.

One of Mazzetti’s earliest articles for the NYTs was a little Negroponte bashing. In this piece he criticizes the security official for stating in public that “the United States' global spying apparatus now numbered nearly 100,000 people.”

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05E1D6143FF932A15757C0A9609C8B63

In March, 2007, Mazzetti served as a mouthpiece for those who believed that caution was never warranted when making an intelligence estimate. The article links Iran and North Korea, a logical fallacy, but persuasive rhetoric since everyone knows North Korea actively pursues nuclear technology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/02/washington/02intel.html

The new caution reflects adherence to what some officials now call “the Powell Rule.” That rule is intended to avoid a repetition of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s humiliation after the satellite photos and intercepted communications he presented to the United Nations Security Council as proof that Iraq was stockpiling banned weapons turned out to be nothing of the sort.

You got that? According to Mazzetti, US intelligence is more concerned with avoiding any harm to its reputation than with the security of Americans. Keep in mind. Negroponte’s assessment of Iran’s lack of nuclear threat was now one year old, and it is likely that Cheney had a good idea which way the wind was blowing within the intelligence community.

Soon, Negroponte was out and McConnell was in, however as Mazzetti describes in subsequent articles, McConnell was unable to fire staff who were already in place in key positions within the intelligence community.

In the summer of 2007, the CIA decided to release its “Family Jewels”, the report commissioned in the wake of Watergate which described decades of illegal activities by the agency. The President Gerald Ford had been shocked by the document. He and Kissinger had objected to its release. The very idea of assembling such a mea culpa had seemed to them such a weakening of the CIA that it lead to the installation of a strong man leader, George Bush Sr.
Mazzetti wrote several articles about last summer’s release of the family jewels, with speculation as to the reason behind the move.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/23/washington/23hayden.html

] Mr. Bamford said one cynical interpretation of the move to declassify the family jewels could be that the agency was looking to make the operations for which it has most recently been criticized seem less nefarious by contrasting them with what went on in the old days.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/washington/27cia.html

"Some intelligence experts suggested on Tuesday that the release of the documents was intended to distract from the current controversies."

Mazzetti also performs an admirable job as a watchdog, reporting on every CIA scandal, such as those involving torture, bribery, whistle blowers. Taken out of context, these might seem the work of someone who is dedicated to protecting the public from a government which does not hold itself accountable to its citizens.

How does Mazzetti spend his time when he is not pointing out the CIA’s faults and telling the world that spying is an inaccurate science? He is busy telling the world that Israeli spying is a very accurate science . The following is a mini-epic which I call the “We must stop negotiating with North Korea and get to war with Syria” Saga, in reverse order. The first link is the last one written and it the best imo, full of evidence that Israel really did bomb a nuke.

Commercial satellite photographs have begun to circulate that appear to show a reactor possibly under construction at a site in Syria near the Euphrates River. The images were taken during the summer, a month before the Israeli raid.

The White House now finds itself charting a similar course to the one for which it heaped criticism on the Clinton administration in 2002, accusing it of being too trusting. At that time, a diplomatic agreement with North Korea collapsed after the White House accused North Korea of secretly continuing work on a nuclear weapon.

Now, the White House is trying to deflect criticism from fellow Republicans, including even hawkish officials within the administration, that Rice is putting her desires for a diplomatic agreement above national security interests.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/washington/25weapons.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/washington/10diplo.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/22/world/middleeast/22weapons.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/world/middleeast/15intel.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/world/middleeast/12syria.html

So, the moral is, Mazetti does not trust the US intelligence community, but the Israeli intelligence community is another matter entirely. Guess that means we should just sack those 100,000 people we have working for us and turn the whole operation over to Israel, then we would be much, much safer.

I wonder what Israel would like us to do about Iran?

[DeanDem10]

1. WOW!

Incredible work here. Thank you so much. I am pretty new here, but each day, I look for your journals. Your are up there with the very best in the blogosphere (digby, Daily Howler, etc.).

I won't say keep up the good work because you've been doing it for some time...

As a blogger I can only say, as did the Dana Carvey character "I'm not worthy."

[McCamy Taylor]

2. The Note on Mazzetti's Syria work with comparison to Judy Miller

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/002433.php

On other fronts, David Sanger's and Mark Mazzetti's piece on Syrian nuclear plant activities does disturb. Mostly because I don't buy it. . .at least not yet. My intel sources don't concur that this was a nuclear plant -- but rather that it was a machine tool operation to modernize Syrian scud missiles with air burst capacity warheads. Such warheads could 'eventually' be outfitted with some nasty kinds of things -- including chemical, bio, and nuke warheads.

I hate to be at odds with Sanger and Mazzetti as I admire them both a great deal -- but they need to make sure that they are not being "Judith Miller'd". I leave open the door that my sources could be wrong, but bombing a nuke site as opposed to a machine operation to raise the level of potential terror that Syria could rain on Israel (far more cheaply) are vastly different in scale.

[defendandprotect]

3. The NY Times is to be monitored not taken for granted ---

Granted, one story knocked the other off the front pages ---
is that what Americans wanted? No --- of course not.

Was it necesary? Of course not ---

On the other hand, we have had questions about Democratic leadership ---
no impeachment -- ignoring of administration criminal activity --- illegal war ---
warprofiteering --- wiretapping --- torture programs --- ripping up treaties ---
signing statements -- on and on . . .

No one calling for a special prosecutor --- ???

We have the possibility of Pelosi having made a deal with GOP leadership re impeachment ---
and while a separate problem from the rest of this -- we now are informed that
she knew about the torture program and didn't whistleblow -- thereby again taking Bush off hook.

Does this make Bush/Cheney warmongering re Iran anything less --- of course not !!!
Does it make the NIE report anything less --- ? NO!

Does it make Bush more popular --- No!


These are separate issues ---
and we need to find the answer to Democratic leadership ---
and possibile betrayals.

[nxylas]

4. Could Mazzetti be working for a rival agency?

I don't know if anything like this happens in America, but when I lived in Britain, there was a long-standing turf war between MI5 and Special Branch, and if you read an article bashing one of those agencies in a British newspaper, 9 times out of 10, it was by a journalist with contacts in the other agency. Could something similar be happening here?

[McCamy Taylor]

5. I am not even going to speculate. All I know is that the 2 torture tape story was timed

to damage the Iran NIE. The source of the story was at least as important as the (two year old) story itself, and yet the Times did not report on the source at all, even though they have to know that readers like me are speculating. One possibility, it was fed to Mazzetti and he took the bait with dreams of Pulitzer Prizes like the one that the WaPo's Dana Priest got for a CIA expose completely oblivious to the harm which it would do to the Iran NIE . He would have to be an idiot not to realize what damage it would do to the Iran NIE, non? But maybe he didn't care. Reporters like scoops. And they really like Pulitzer Prizes.

The scary possibility, did he or the NYTs know before the Iran NIE and did they decide to release it after the Iran NIE, because the NYT has an agenda, which is to promote a US-Iran War. Remember Michael Gordon, the voice activated tape recorder?

Mazzetti needs to divulge his source and to tell when he learned about the 2 destroyed tapes. Was his source a CIA whistleblower? Was it someone in the Office of the Vice President, trying to get pay back for Scooter Libby? Did the NYT sit on this story for a year, like the they did the domestic spying story? The NYT is hardly a defender of democracy. Never forget Judy Miller. She was not rogue. Her newspaper abetted her.

What worries me most about Mazzetti is the fact that he creates a narrative, that goes something like "I arrive at the NYTs in the Spring of 2006 (right after Negroponte indicated that Iran isn't trying to get nukes). Porter Goss of the CIA can do no right. Here are all the scandals that have occurred at the CIA under his tenure. Bad Porter Goss. Bad, Bad. Look, here is bright and shiny Hayden. Rejoice! Happy days are here again. And again. Oops, another CIA scandal, but it is a Goss scandal. And look at that! Republicans in Congress think that Negroponte is a bad boy, because he is downplaying the threat posed by Iran. We are not sorry to see you go, Mr. Negroponte (though we are glad that you finally admitted that Iran is a threat). And Hayden says Iran is a threat. And the administration says that Iran is a threat. And Israeli intelligence says that Iran is a threat. Hmmm. Why is the CIA trying to clean up their act all of a sudden? That is soooo suspicious. They must be up to something. Did I mention that Iran is a threat? And Syria has nukes. Yes they do. Really. The Israeli intelligence said so, and last summer I said that their intelligence is better than ours."

This is the perspective of someone who has a NeoCon source.