There’s a way to assuage fears on this. South Africa ended its nuclear program, and they did it publicly; they even offered advice to Saddam Hussein on how to do it to the satisfaction of the world. Moammar Khadafy did the same thing. There was no doubt. The IAEA, good old Mohamed ElBaradei, is still being denied access and not given complete answers to their questions. This is in a New York Times piece today. So we are to accept the word of three State Department people, one of them with a grudge, on Iran, about not being listened to by the Bush administration. North Korea is supposedly doing it now, too, dismantling their nuclear program, and that’s being done under some watchdog eyes. But the Iranians are not being forced to do this. We’re just supposed to accept the report from these three State Department people, one of them obviously with a grudge, and then Mahmoud could go out and claim victory, and we’re supposed to go, ‘Oh, kumbaya! It’s so wonderful. The world is safe again, Mr. Limbaugh. The safe world has come thrust upon us, despite Bush’s warmongering tendencies.’
How do we know? Are we going to accept what’s in this report, as varied and inaccurate as intelligence has been in this country in the last ten or 12 years? There’s a way to do this, and Mahmoud will not answer any questions and Mahmoud will not let anybody in there to see. In fact, Mahmoud is out saying that they’re doing it! Now the report comes out and says they’re not doing it, and he says, ‘See? I’m not doing it.’ Now, I’m not trying to scare anybody about this. This is not the point. I’m not fearmongering or anything of the sort, and I’m going to tell you this. IF — capital ‘I,’ capital ‘F’ — IF we find out that this is has all been trumped up by these State Department people with grudges, one of them with a grudge, I hope it is made public. It will have to be if we found out this is bogus. I’m reminded of the very brave and courageous State Department officials who refused postings to a new embassy in Baghdad.
‘Well, we’re not going over there. Well, what about our kids? Well, that’s a war zone. We’re not going over there.’
This guy was trumpeting. We made it a big deal. Where’s this guy today? Somebody, they got this guy off the front pages. One of the reasons why is they came up with some volunteers to fill the posts, but the original people who were assigned, many of them — I think it was 16 — refused to go.
‘Well, it’s a war zone. We’re not going!’
Wait a minute, State Department. You’re all about diplomacy. You’re all about solving these kinds of crises with words, and doctors, and nurses, and clean water, and foreign aid. Go over there and show us how it’s done! Now, all of a sudden, we have diffused the Iranian nuclear program with a report. This doesn’t pass the smell test. There’s nothing about this that passes the smell test, ladies and gentlemen — and, look, what I always do is follow my instincts and my intelligence guided by experience, not what I hope is the case, not what I wish happens. Something just doesn’t sound right, doesn’t smell right here, and it’s troubling to me, because it’s a very, very serious consequence we’re dealing with if this thing turns out to be wrong.
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RUSH: Here’s Pat in Houston, Texas. Pat, welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Mega dittos, longtime listener, second-time caller.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I was a former CIA case officer, and I worked on two NIEs in the past, both of them on the Middle East.
RUSH: Wait a second. Can I ask you a question?
CALLER: Yes.
CALLER: Yeah, I can. I’ve been gone for a number of years. You can’t talk about specific actions, sources, methods, but you can generally acknowledge —
RUSH: That you were there.
CALLER: — that you worked for the Agency.
RUSH: Okay. You can acknowledge you were there. Proceed. Thank you.
CALLER: Okay, the NIEs are really puff pieces. They are, by design, low-level classification releases of information, and the material that goes in is classified at a low level. It’s ‘confidential’ or ‘secret.’ So, really, it’s garbage in, garbage out. The actionable intelligence that’s real-time, of value, has a much higher classification. So, for example, anything that the NSA does is top secret and code word. By that nature it can’t be revealed or utilized or discussed, for an NIE estimate. On the CIA’s material, a lot of the agent material that you would get, the raw intelligence, would carry a much higher classification than can be used in a National Intelligence Estimate. So they are by design mostly State Department INR material.
RUSH: But Pat, why not? Because the attacks to the NIE is never made public, the only people that can see it are intelligence committee members of the House and Senate? You know, the key judgment… They have a little summary that we got on Monday that is made public, but none of the reasoning and none of the evidence or the intelligence that led to this key judgment will ever be known. It can’t be.
CALLER: The NIE that has been released, there are a number of versions of this. There is a top-secret classified version, which will differ from the one that’s been made public. Because it has real-time intelligence, it has protecting sources and methods. So when you get to a very low-level classified release like this one was, it is dated material. It is material that is acquired through less than sophisticated means. So, by design, it’s a puff piece.
RUSH: All right, let me ask you a question. Hypothetical question. But this happens. We will get a government report on jobs or a government report on the economy, and then a month later we’ll get the revised version and we’ll find that economic growth was higher than the original release, jobs, many things of this nature. Is it possible that, in the coming days or weeks, when people have read this whole thing, that they might say, ‘You know what? That was a premature conclusion, that the full report doesn’t actually say they gave up their program in 2003. That was just in the key judgment, the little release?’ Is it possible this thing is going to get reversed, once somebody sees the whole thing?
CALLER: Yes. Because in those key (garbled) released, it doesn’t say that they restarted the program in 2005, or they restarted in 2006, or that the Iranian ministry of defense was having shipments from Pakistan as we speak, or from China. That is so high classified, it would not be in the NIE, but there will be reports delivered to the people with those security clearances that will identify precisely what’s going on.
RUSH: Is it troubling to you, as a former spook, that only now in 2007 are we figuring out that they supposedly shut down the nuclear weapons program in 2003, four years ago?
CALLER: I wouldn’t believe it. I would believe that some State Department cocktail conversation came out where a Jordanian ambassador spoke to some State Department person in Amman, Jordan, and said that, and that got created into a legend, and that would be the result of a State Department key judgment. I’m just saying that there is a lot of intelligence — raw, actual intelligence — that never sees the light of day to an NIE. However, there are lots of reports that are delivered to the top policy makers that are highly classified —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER — that have a lot more accuracy to them.
RUSH: Well, the problem with this is that it’s been released and now everybody believes that the nuclear program in Iran has been shut down, and the people who are saying, ‘This ties the president’s hands on increased, tightening sanctions, future military action,’ are exactly right. So, if that was the purpose, if there was a political purpose behind this key judgment released on Monday, then it’s been successful. Because even now two weeks from now if something changes, who’s going to hear about it? Who’s going to know? I don’t know. This just doesn’t pass the smell test to me, and to listen now to the Democrats go wailing and just cheering this and so forth is doubly troubling to me, because they’re not even looking at the substance of the issue. Pat, I appreciate the phone call.
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RUSH: Kim in Williamsburg, Pennsylvania, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
RUSH: Dittos, Rush, it’s an honor. One question about this NIE, what does this do to Israel? If the Mossad sees something going on in Iran, are they just hamstrung?
RUSH: No.
CALLER: The world is going to come down on them like a ton of bricks.
RUSH: Did the world come down on them like a ton of bricks when they blew up a nuclear plant in Syria not long ago?
CALLER: No, but there hadn’t been an NIE about Syria just prior to that.
RUSH: Doesn’t matter. The thing about that incident was that the Saudis — none of the Arab world issued a peep, none of them said a word about it, and nobody knew it. The Saudis didn’t know about it. The Israelis knew about it. We might have. They went in there, and they blew the thing to smithereens. I guarantee you old Bashar Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had to be scared witless because the Israelis were able to penetrate radar. They got in and out of there before the Syrians knew they’d been hit. None of the Russian radar worked. None of the detection systems that they got from the Russians worked. The Israelis are able to get in their stealthfully.
CALLER: Well, I hope you’re right, but I just hope Israel doesn’t think that way. I hope they don’t do or not do something that they should do.
RUSH: Israel is not going to act indiscriminately or without provocation. Somebody over there in their government has to be looking at what’s happening here this week with the NIE and saying, ‘We’re stranded again, it’s going to be up to us.’ And, believe me, they are not going to allow themselves to be bombed off the Earth or marched into the Mediterranean Sea because of an NIE report. If they’ve got evidence that Iran is building up nukes and is planning to use ’em, they’re not going to wait. They’ll answer the questions later, but they’re going to save themselves, they’re going to preserve their nation, and they’re going to send a message to anybody else who might try it at the same time.
CALLER: All right. I feel better.
RUSH: You should.
CALLER: Thanks.
RUSH: You bet.