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Iraq

Baghdad Bombs & Bullets Bulletin

2018-02-15

Two civilians wounded in bomb blast near Baghdad markets Baghdad (Iraqinews.com) – Two civilians were injured Wednesday in a bomb blast near popular markets in western Baghdad, a security source was quoted as saying. Speaking to Alghad Press, the source said, “An explosive charge went off near busy street markets at al-Maamel area in western Baghdad.” “The explosion left two civilians wounded,” the source said, pointing out that the security forces cordoned off the blast site and allowed ambulance to carry the injured to a nearby hospital for treatment. Baghdad command denies reports about car bomb blast near party’s HQ Baghdad (Iraqinews.com) – The Baghdad Operations Command denied on Wednesday media reports published on social networking websites about detonating a booby-trapped vehicle near the headquarters of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) party in western Baghdad. In a statement, a copy of which was obtained by Baghdad Today news website, the command described as “groundless” the news published on the INC’s Facebook page about a car bomb blast near its headquarters at al-Mansour district, west of Baghdad, on Tuesday night. The command explained that security forces were suspicious about a car parked near the party’s premises, but after inspecting it they found out that it was not booby-trapped. The command, therefore, called on all media outlets and news websites to seek accuracy before publishing any news of such a kind and to take information only from reliable sources. Police conscript killed in armed attack near house, west of Baghdad Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) A police conscript has been killed as gunmen opened fire against him in west of Baghdad, a security source said on Tuesday. Speaking to Baghdad Today website, the source said, “unidentified gunmen opened fire against a police conscript in al-Bakriya region, west of Baghdad.” “The victim succumbed to death near his house,” the source added. Two civilians wounded in bomb blast near Baghdad markets Baghdad (Iraqinews.com) – Two civilians were wounded Tuesday in a bomb attack near street markets in northern Baghdad, a security source was quoted as saying. In a press statement to Alghad Press, the source said, “A bomb placed near busy street markets went off in al-Rashdiya neighborhood, north of Baghdad, leaving two civilians wounded.” “Ambulances rushed to the blast site and carried the injured to a nearby hospital for treatment,” the source added. Six people killed, injured as bomb attack targets popular market in Baghdad Baghdad (Iraqinews.com) – Six people were killed and injured Tuesday in a bomb explosion in western Baghdad, a security source was quoted as saying. Speaking to Baghdad Today news website, the source said, “An explosive charge went off near busy street markets in al-Radwaniyah area, west of Baghdad.” “The explosion left a citizen dead and five others injured,” the source said, adding that ambulances rushed to the blast site and carried the injured to a nearby hospital for treatment, while the dead was moved to the forensic medicine department.

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Fifth Column

World's Longest Correction

2014-10-18

Ouch. [NYSun] That New York Times dispatch on what it calls "The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons" is best viewed as journalism's longest correction. It's designed to try to extricate the Gray Lady from all these charges about how President George W. Bush and his camarilla lied about the danger of Saddam's chemical arsenal. For it turns out that Iraq was littered with thousands of shells containing poison gas, like Sarin. The Times tries to palm off on its readers the idea that this is different from the "active weapons of mass destruction program" that America had gone to war to destroy. We don't blame C.J. Chivers, the Timesman who penned this opus. It was a tall order, and he did the best he could. He's cranked out something on the order of 10,000 words. We ran the whole dispatch through one of our favorite contraptions for the modern editor: The patented "Straight-talk Gasoline Operated High Volume Prose Compactor." We have the Tolstoy 100 model, which can handle stories twice the length of Chivers'. It summarized his piece this way: "Dang, we're angry at Mr. Bush for failing to tell us we found the weapons that he had warned were there and that the Times insisted weren't." To cover its own bumbling of the story, the Times tries to blame Mr. Bush for the fact that a number of our heroic GIs were injured by poison from the weapons the Times had claimed were a fiction. "The secrecy fit a pattern," says the Times. "Since the outset of the war, the scale of the United States' encounters with chemical weapons in Iraq was neither publicly shared nor widely circulated within the military. These encounters carry worrisome implications now that the Islamic State, a Qaeda splinter group, controls much of the territory where the weapons were found." You're telling us. Implication number one is that the Times ought to bring back Judith Miller and install her as its foreign editor. She was the reporter who got fired because she broke the story that we needed to go in there and get these weapons. For penance the Times could put her in charge of covering the war against the Islamic State. Number two is that the Times owes Ahmad Chalabi an apology. It has done nothing but libel him for inspiriting the Iraqi National Congress. It has suggested he purposely misled America, even though what he sought was a Free Iraq. Finally it owes an apology to President Bush. He has devoted his post-presidency to inspiriting the GIs whom he sent into battle, particularly those who suffered life-changing injuries. He rides bikes and golfs with them, thinks about them all the time, keeps faith with them. He knew we couldn't withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, warning "they will follow us home." That's what they're fixing to do now that we have withdrawn from Iraq and are withdrawing from Afghanistan. Our advice to the Times is that before it goes into print attacking our President and our GIs, it would be wise to think through what kind of correction it's going to have to run ten years hence.

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Iraq

Chalabi's Chance?

2014-06-22

[NYSun] Well, well, well. Guess who has gone calling on Ahmad Chalabi. Why, if it's not Brett McGurk, the senior aide of the State Department in respect of Iraq. He's just fetched up at the home in Storied Baghdad of the founder of the Iraqi National Congress. Mr. Chalabi is the visionary who won the Iraq Liberation Act of 1995. He's the man whom the Left likes to blame for allegedly making up intelligence to trick America to going to war for Democracy in his country. The State Department hated him above all others. Now it's come a-calling. This news was brought in by Eli Lake, former diplomatic leg of the Sun, in a dispatchnull that the Daily Beast runs under the headline "U.S. Taps Old Allies for New Iraq War." Mr. Lake is not reporting that the visit with Mr. Chalabi is going to lead to the return of American GIs to Iraq. He is following up on the dispatch Thursday in the Times that named Mr. Chalabi as among the challengers emerging to replace Prime Minister al-Maliki. Indeed, it was our government that was behind the purge of Mr. Chalabi from the interim Iraqi government that was established in 2004 and led by Iyad Allawi ... Iraqi politician, interim Prime Minister prior to Iraq's 2005 legislative elections. A former Ba'athist, Allawi helped found the Iraqi National Accord, which today is an active political party. He survived assassination attempts in 1978, in 2004, and on April 20, 2005. One of these days he won't... . Relations were decidedly cool as Mr. Chalabi plotted his comeback. The Times reports that he's now willing to bring the Baathists back into public life, meaning ending the anti-Baathist legislation he long supported. Mr. Chalabi, a Shia, seems to be acceptable to the Kurds. So we will see what happens. Our own favorite Chalabi moment came when he was asked by an interviewer in Britannia whether Iraq needed another strongman, a la Hamid Maybe I'll join the Taliban Karzai ... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a Pashtun face on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use... of Afghanistan. No, he retorted, what Iraq needed was another Ludwig Erhard. This was a reference to the Free German economics minister who set the stage for a Western victory in the Cold war by establishing sound money in West Germany. This brought the economy to life, setting the contrast between West Germany and the communist East.

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Home Front: WoT

Cheney Eyed Iraq Oil, Says Bush Speech Writer

2013-03-18

David Frum, speech writer for former President George W. Bush, reflected on the beginnings of the Iraq war in an article for Newsweek published Monday. In the article, Frum says then-Vice President Dick Cheney had his eye on Iraqi oil, although Frum does not claim this contributed to the decision to go to war. Frum recounts his impressions of Ahmed Chalabi, a wealthy Iraqi Shiite who formed the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group opposed to Saddam Hussein. “I was less impressed by Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration. However, since one of those ‘others’ was Vice President Cheney, it didn’t matter what I thought,” wrote Frum. Frum said that when Chalabi joined the summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute in Colorado in 2002, “He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia.” Neither oil nor Cheney figure prominently in the rest of Frum’s article. An article published in Wired magazine on Monday by a former CIA analyst expressed anger at Cheney for deceiving the public. Nada Bakos, in the article “I Tried to Make the Intelligence Behind the Iraq War Less Bogus,” said her intelligence team was lead “down a rabbit hole.” Only one conclusion was acceptable, whether it was entirely true or not: Hussein had ties to al-Qaeda. Bakos wrote: “On Sunday, March 16, 2003, I watched Cheney on ‘Meet The Press’ contradict our assessment publicly. ‘We know that he [Saddam] has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups,’ Cheney said, ‘including the al-Qaeda organization.’ Cheney was asserting to the public as fact something that we found to be anything but.”

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Iraq

Ibrahim al-Jaafari elected head of NA

2010-12-28

BAGHDAD / Aswat al-Iraq: The National Alliance unanimously elected Ibrahim al-Jaafari as a leader of the bloc on Monday, a media source said. “The Leader of the National Reform Movement, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, was unanimously elected as a head of the National Allinace during a meeting held this evening,” the source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency. The meeting was attended by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad al-Jalabi,” he added.

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Iraq

Ansar al-Sunna head cheese in custody

2009-01-12

An official spokesman for the Fardh al-Qanoon security plan on Sunday accused figures from within the country's political process of collaborating with armed organizations to hinder the government's efforts in Iraq. "Security forces arrested the so-called commander-in-chief of the Ansar al-Sunna group, Tha'er Kadhem Abad Salman al-Samarraie in Baghdad's al-Yarmuk area on December 18, 2008," said Maj. General Qassem Atta during a press conference he held in Baghdad today (Jan. 11), attended by Aswat al-Iraq news agency. "The detainee has confessed to his responsibility for several bombing operations and facilitating foreign gunmen's entry into Iraq," said Atta, adding Samarraie "also confessed to having links with figures from within the political process that try to throw a spanner in the government's efforts and achievements made at the political and security levels". The security agencies have investigated Samarraie and referred him to courts after his confessions, Atta said, not revealing any names of political figures he said involved. "The Baghdad Operations Command (BOC) believed it should be better for the integrity of the investigations not to reveal these names," he said. The BOC chief noted that Sammarraie claimed responsibility for a car bomb attack in the area of al-Muqdadiya in return for $10,000, mortar attacks on residential sections in Diala province, two car bomb blasts in al-Bayya in 2007, three car bombs in al-Hurriya area in July 2007 and killing six truck drivers in Diala. Samarraie also confessed to supervising an improvised explosive device (IED) attack that targeted the motorcade of Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) party, killing 17 policemen in Muqdadiya by setting fake checkpoints on highways, kidnapping and killing National Guard personnel in Baghdad's al-Amiriya area in collaboration with a sahwa (awakening) tribal fighter, killing a civilian man in al-Dawoudi area, overseeing sectarian-motivated forced displacement operations in al-Mansour and al-Rabie areas and detonating the house of Iraqi lawmaker Mithal al-Alusi's mother, Atta added. "Samarraie also has links with neighboring countries that would not be named for the integrity of the investigations," he said.

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Iraq

Iraqi MP reinstated after visit to Israel

2008-11-30

An Iraqi court has overturned a decision by parliament to strip Sunni MP Mithal Alusi of his immunity for visiting Israel earlier this year, Alusi's aide said on Saturday. Alusi, the Democratic Party of the Iraqi Nation's sole lawmaker, "will be back in parliament" when it convenes in December to discuss the budget, Adel al-Juburi told AFP. "The constitutional court rejected a request by parliament to postpone by six months a hearing and quickly issued its verdict" to allow Alusi to resume his parliamentary duties, Juburi added. On September 14, parliament lifted Alusi's immunity for visiting Israel earlier that month to attend an international conference on terrorism, and also voted to ban him from attending parliamentary sessions or traveling abroad. Parliament also asked prosecutors to press charges against Alusi for visiting the Jewish state, with which Iraq has no diplomatic ties. Egypt and Jordan are the only Arab countries to have peace treaties with Israel. At the time, Shiite MP Ali al-Adeeb, who has close ties with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said Iraqi law bans trips to Israel. But Alusi's lawyer, Tareq Harb, told AFP the constitutional court overruled parliament's decision and that its verdict was without appeal. Alusi also visited Israel in September 2004 when he was a member of the Iraqi National Congress, the party led by former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi. He was expelled from that party for making the visit and set up his own party. Alusi has survived several assassination attempts in recent years. Two sons and a bodyguard were killed in one attempt on his life in February 2005.

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Iraq

Iraq parliament lifts immunity of Sunni MP

2008-09-15

The Iraqi parliament lifted the immunity of Sunni MP Mithal Alusi on Sunday for visiting Israel last week to attend an international conference on terrorism. Parliament voted to ban Alusi from travelling outside Iraq or attending its sessions, and to ask prosecutors to press charges against him for visiting the Jewish state. The action against Alusi, the sole member of his own parliamentary faction, was agreed by acclamation. The MP's trip to Israel last week was his second since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. He previously visited Israel in September 2004. During his latest visit, Alusi spoke at the Herzliya Institute for Policy and Strategy near Tel Aviv where, according to Shiite MP Ali al-Adeeb, he urged support for Israel. Alusi said his visit to Israel was not an official visit. "I did not represent Iraq. It was a personal visit following an invitation," Alusi told parliament. At the time of his 2004 visit, Alusi was a member of the Iraqi National Congress, the party led by former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi. But he was expelled from the party for making the visit and set up his own party known as Al Umma, or the Democratic Party of the Iraqi Nation, of which he is the sole representative in the 275-member parliament. According to Iraqi press reports, in his address to the Herzliya Institute, Alusi called for greater cooperation against Iran. "Iran today is the centre for disaster in the region. The majority of Iraqi people do not support the Tehran regime," he was quoted as saying. "We should cooperate with Israel in gathering intelligence, along with Turkey, Kuwait and the United States, to guarantee an exchange of information in order to confront terrorism together." Alusi has survived several assassination attempts in recent years. Two sons and a bodyguard were killed in one attempt on his life in February 2005.

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Iraq

Car bomb that targeted Chalabi is state-owned -- spokesman

2008-09-09

(VOI) -- The car bomb that targeted the motorcade of Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, in western Baghdad on Friday belongs to a state department, an official spokesman for the INC said on Monday. "The initial investigations held that the explosive vehicle that targeted the INC leader's convoy belonged to a state department and contained two cannon shells of 130 mm. caliber," Muhammad Hassan al-Musawi said in a press release by the INC as received by Aswat al-Iraq -- Voices of Iraq -- (VOI). Chalabi's motorcade had come under a bombing attack in the western Baghdad area of al-Mansour, leaving two civilians killed and 17 others, including nine of his bodyguards, wounded. "Investigations are still going on to unravel this sinful operation," Musawi added. Chalabi, an ex-Iraqi deputy prime minister and former Pentagon favorite, survived the attack unscathed. A secular Shiite who was once viewed by Washington as a possible successor to Saddam Hussein, Chalabi was on his way to his headquarters in the area when the bomb exploded, his office said. After spending most of his life abroad, Chalabi returned to Iraq in 2003 and served in the 25-member Governing Council appointed by the American occupation authorities to run the country's day-to-day affairs. He was a member of the next two cabinets, serving as finance minister and then as deputy prime minister but failed to win a seat in parliament in the 2005 election. He now is chairman of the debaathification commission, which is responsible for keeping Saddam loyalists out of government posts and is believed to have escaped several assassination attempts since 2003.

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Iraq

Chalabi's Short-Lived Comeback

2008-05-17

Ahmad Chalabi is nothing if not indefatigable. The dapper Iraqi multimillionaire who was instrumental in pressing the U.S. to invade Iraq — and viewed by many in Washington as the presumptive leader of a future Iraqi government — failed to win a seat in his country's parliament in 2005, and came under suspicion in Washington of passing secrets to Iran (although no charges were ever filed in this respect). Still, he bounced back, and was tapped last November to run a committee tasked with improving the delivery of basic services such as water and electricity in Baghdad. The post required coordinating with U.S. officials including General David Petraeus, and Chalabi hoped to use it to begin building a new power base on the streets of Baghdad, especially among the 2.5 million potential voters of the hardscrabble Sadr City. But not if Washington has any say in the matter: This week, according to two U.S. officials, America's diplomats and military liaisons were told to cut off ties with Chalabi. One official said the instruction came in anticipation of Chalabi being taken off the Baghdad Services Committee, adding that if the Iraqi government is removing him from his position, then there is no need to contact him or provide support. NBC News first reported the rebuke on its website, citing American concern over Chalabi's contacts with Iran. A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad would not elaborate on the order, saying "we maintain contact with a wide variety of Iraqi interlocutors." Chalabi, through a spokesman, said he had not been informed of any change in his relationship with the U.S. or Iraqi governments. Chalabi also denied that his dealings with Iran were any different from those of Iraq's current President, Jalal Talibani, or Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Allegations about Chalabi's ties to Iran are not new. His Baghdad compound was raided in 2004 when U.S. officials suspected he had warned Iranian intelligence that the U.S. had broken its communications codes. A subsequent FBI investigation led to no charges, and Chalabi was never questioned in the matter, even when he traveled to the U.S. in 2005 as a deputy prime minister of Iraq. Since then, U.S. contact with Chalabi has been mostly limited to his efforts to bring power generators and water trucks to the most neglected neighborhoods of Baghdad. His new position had provided Chalabi with some political capital, and a little publicity. His political organization, the Iraqi National Congress, recently launched a weekly newspaper dedicated to citizens' complaints about the lack of services around Baghdad. An op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on April 12 wrote that "arguably [Chalabi] has, more than anyone in the country, evolved a detailed sense of what ails Baghdad and how to fix things." Over the past six months, Chalabi has focused a lot of attention on delivering services to Sadr City, the northeast Baghdad Shi'ite slum that is a major stronghold of the firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. To do this required close coordination with al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, which has over the past month been locked in fierce battles with U.S. and Iraqi government forces. The U.S. alleges that elements of the Mahdi Army have received training and weapons from Iran. "We talk to the Madhi Army," says Chalabi spokesman Mohammad Hassan al-Moussawi, "because the Madhi Army is the one holding the ground [in Sadr City]." But his coordination with the Sadrists has put Chalabi at odds with Prime Minister Maliki. Malaki launched a military offensive in March to squeeze the Mahdi Army out of Sadr City. One of the militia's tactics, taking a page out of the playbook of Lebanon's Hizballah, has been to secure popular support by delivering some of their basic welfare needs. A U.S. official says it is for this reason that Chalabi's coordination with the militia in the course of delivering basic services in Sadr City has become a point of contention with Maliki. And the U.S. is simply following the lead of the Iraqi government by cutting ties with Chalabi, says the official. "This is a beef between Maliki and Chalabi," a U.S. official told TIME, "and we back Maliki." Chalabi's office denies any tension. "We have very good relations with Maliki," says a spokesman, adding that all of his efforts to deliver services in Sadr City are being done not to serve Chalabi's personal political ambitions, but "in the name of the Iraqi government." No longer, it seems.

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Iraq

Rethinking the Iraq Critics

2008-05-10

In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we've learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists only could guess at what was going on behind the scenes. Today we're only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes in regard to Iraq. One important new source is the recently published "War and Decision" by Douglas Feith, the No. 3 civilian at the Pentagon from 2001 to 2005. Feith quotes extensively from unpublished documents and contemporary memorandums, just as in the late 1940s Robert Sherwood did in "Roosevelt and Hopkins" and Winston Churchill did in his World War II histories. The picture Feith paints is at considerable variance from the narratives with which we've become familiar. One such narrative is, "Bush lied; people died." The claim is that "neocons," including Feith, politicized intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction. Not so, as the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb Commission have concluded already. Every intelligence agency believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the post-invasion Duelfer report concluded that he maintained the capability to produce them on short notice. There was abundant evidence of contacts between Saddam's regime and al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. Given Saddam's hostility to the United States and his stonewalling of the United Nations, American leaders had every reason to believe he posed a grave threat. Removing him removed that threat. Unfortunately -- and here Feith is critical of his ultimate boss, George W. Bush -- the administration allowed its critics to frame the issue around the fact that stockpiles of weapons weren't found. Here we see at work the liberal fallacy, apparent in debates on gun control, that weapons are the problem rather than the people with the capability and will to use them to kill others. The fact that millions of law-abiding Americans have guns is not a problem; the problem is that criminals can get them and have the will to kill others. Similarly, the fact that France has WMDs is not a problem; the fact that Saddam Hussein had the capability to produce WMDs and the will to use them against us was. Feith identifies as our central mistake the decision not to create an Iraqi Interim Authority to take over some sovereign functions soon after the overthrow of Saddam. Bush ordered the creation of such an authority March 10, 2003. But it was resisted by State Department and CIA leaders, who argued that Iraqis would not trust "externals" -- those in exile -- and who were especially determined to keep the Iraqi National Congress' Ahmed Chalabi from power. As head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer took the State-CIA view and, without much supervision from Washington, decided that the U.S. occupation would continue for as long as two years. Only deft negotiation by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld produced a June 30, 2004, deadline for returning authority to Iraqis. The January 2005 elections placed many of the "externals," including Chalabi, in high office. Feith admits he made mistakes and misjudgments. He criticizes Bush for not defending the main rationale for invasion -- protecting Americans from a genuine threat -- and instead emphasizing the subsidiary and iffy goal of establishing democracy. He says little about military operations, beyond noting that Bremer and the military leaders had no common approach to combating disorder. There's still much to be learned about our decisions, good and bad, in Iraq. But Feith's book is a step forward, as were those of Sherwood and Churchill 60 years ago.

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Home Front: Politix

Abolish the CIA

2007-12-12

by Christopher Hitchens 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. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair

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