Lawmakers must get answers about what nuclear-weaponization activities Iran has engaged in — and what the Biden–Harris administration is doing about it.
Lawmakers must get answers about what nuclear-weaponization activities Iran has engaged in — and what the Biden–Harris administration is doing about it.
O ne of the many reasons I was a detractor of the 9/11 Commission was its counterintuitive “ramp up the bureaucracy” solution, so typical of Washington, to a problem — namely, lack of intelligence sharing — that was caused, in part, by there having already been too much bureaucracy. This solution, adopted by Congress in the similarly typical “let’s at least look like we’re doing something to fix this” mode, gave us the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
Like another post-9/11 “fix,” the Department of Homeland Security, the ODNI is among the most redundant government bureaucracies. That is, its necessary functions were already being performed by other agencies before it was created, and its supposed value — drawing better performance out of an intelligence community that its creation made more bloated — is non-existent.
It’s worse than that, though. With nothing useful to add, the ODNI does politics camouflaged as intelligence.
A prime example: The ODNI was an important participant in the report that President Obama rushed out right before leaving office in 2017, which assessed that “Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.” The theory read like a Clinton campaign press release, and we now know it was fed to the intelligence community by the Clinton campaign.
These days, on Iran, the ODNI is up to its old tricks.
The “National Intelligence Estimate” is the ODNI’s best known deliverable. NIEs are said to be the authoritative assessments of the Director of National Intelligence on given national-security issues, based on inputs from the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. The ODNI’s most consequential politicization of intelligence occurred in November 2007, when its NIE announced, “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Iran, of course, never halted its nuclear-weapons program.
You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that a principal generator of the 2007 NIE was then-National Intelligence Council chairman (now Stanford prof) Thomas Fingar, who on the eve of the 2020 election was among the infamous gang of 51 former U.S. national-security officials who, in aid of the Biden campaign, signed the public statement suggesting that the patently authentic Hunter Biden laptop data bore “all the classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation — a formulation crafted by James Clapper, who had run the ODNI in the Obama–Biden administration.
The 2007 NIE was a political agenda masquerading as an intelligence conclusion: The unelected bureaucrats opposed Bush administration Iran hawks, who urged taking military action if necessary to prevent the world’s leading sponsor of anti-American terrorism from acquiring the world’s most deadly weapons. From nearly 40 years of jihadist attacks and cries of “Death to America,” our politician-spies had deduced that Tehran was really teeming with moderates who would wrest control and warm to us if only we groveled just the right way.
To the contrary, no one with a shred of common sense was surprised by the post-NIE revelation that Tehran had constructed a uranium-enrichment facility deep within a mountain range at a base of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps near Qom. Indeed, as our Rich Lowry noted at the time, in 2002 — i.e., just a year before, according to the ODNI, the regime had halted its nuclear-weapons program — “the Iranians were caught with an undeclared enrichment facility at Natanz.” And “a few years later they were caught trying to figure out how to get a warhead onto a Shahab missile.”
AEI scholar Michael Rubin detailed in these pages how Tehran’s cover story — that the oil-rich nation needed an extensive civilian nuclear-power program — did not pass the laugh test and was bluntly acknowledged to be a fraud in discussions among regime leaders. It would be better, Rubin contended, to listen to such insiders as Gholam Reza Hasani, a top aide to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who proclaimed in 2005, that “An atom bomb . . . must be produced as well. . . . because the Qur’an has told Muslims to ‘get strong and amass all the forces at your disposal to be strong.’”
Though our ODNI wizzes wouldn’t tell you so, that actually is an accurate interpretation of Islamic scripture, which such fundamentalist Muslims as Tehran’s mullahs take quite seriously as the words of Allah revealed to Islam’s final prophet. See, for example, Qur’an 8:59-60:
Against them [the Unbelievers] make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies of Allah and your enemies.
An annotation (note 1225) to this passage (and there are many others like it) in a popular English version of the Qur’an produced by the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Hajj and Endowments (The Holy Qur’an – English translation of the meaning and Commentary) instructs:
The immediate occasion of this injunction was the weakness of cavalry and appointments of war in the early fights of Islam. But the general meaning follows. In every fight, physical, moral, or spiritual, arm yourself with the best weapons and the best arms against your enemy, so as to instil [sic] wholesome respect into him for you and the Cause you stand for.
This is among the most obvious reasons why, during the Obama years, I ridiculed the administration’s insistence that Khamenei had issued a fatwa declaring that nuclear weapons violate Islamic law — the absurd tale to which then-secretary of state John Kerry and other big thinkers pivoted when the evidence of Iran’s work on both nuclear fuel and ballistic missiles (to say nothing of its unabashedly declared intention to destroy Israel in conjunction with its facilitation of Hamas) became too overwhelming to continue dismissing out of hand, ODNI-style.
Last month, in a post about national-security concerns under circumstances in which President Biden was (and is) clearly operating at diminished capacity, I related that the Biden–Harris ODNI had failed to produce a statutorily required report on Iran’s nuclear activities, and that Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines had provided no explanation for this dereliction. This was especially alarming in light of (a) the International Atomic Energy Agency’s recent censure of Iran for escalating enrichment activities and dodging IAEA inspectors; (b) Iran’s enrichment of uranium up to 60 percent purity, from which it is not difficult to get to weapons grade; (c) Iran’s stockpile of 313.3 pounds of this fuel, which might be enough for two nuclear bombs; and (d) the Biden–Harris administration’s pressure on the IAEA and European allies not to censure Iran, which it only eased after the allies stood firm.
I thus opined that the administration was stonewalling Congress, four months prior to the election, because it did not want questions about
President Biden’s vow — for example, in the Oval Office on June 28, 2021 — that Iran would “never get a nuclear weapon on my watch.” If we were given an accurate assessment of Iran’s progress, the Biden-Harris administration would have to do something serious about it. The administration doesn’t intend to do anything meaningful.
Under pressure from Senator Lindsay Graham (R., S.C.), DNI Haines finally produced a report, the unclassified public version of which is very brief. It ought to be among the main topics of discussion in the 2024 presidential campaign . . . if, of course, the media were of a mind to ask any questions of Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee who — despite the energetic effort to airbrush this fact — happens to be the sitting vice president who has implemented administration policy for the past four years.
As recounted by the Wall Street Journal editorial board and a valuable analysis it cites by former IAEA Iran inspector David Albright and researcher Sarah Burkard (both now at the Institute for Science and International Security), it has for years been customary for the ODNI to insist that Iran was not “currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities that would be necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.” The July 2024 report, however, marks a shift. The ODNI concedes that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”
Significantly, as Albright and Burkhard elaborate, the ODNI narrowly focuses on statements by Iranian officials and “old news” about the regime’s enrichment capabilities, “while continuing to avoid any type of public discussion on what nuclear weaponization activities Iran may be undertaking” (emphasis added).
That is, the ODNI refrains from describing the “activities” Iran has carried out to facilitate nuclear-weapons production. As Iran gets closer, the Biden–Harris administration hews to its default position that “Iran does not have an active military nuclear program,” as an ODNI official stated in spinning the new report to WSJ reporters. (See my post on Monday.)
To be charitable, one might have abided such delusional thinking back when Iran was believed to be so far behind in enrichment capability that we could assume we’d have several months of notice before it was on the brink of producing an atomic weapon. (I cannot be that charitable. We now know the U.S. intelligence community was unaware of Iran’s Fordow enrichment facility when it generated the 2007 NIE, and Israeli intelligence’s 2018 acquisition of Iran’s nuclear records proved the regime’s years of lies and feverish production activity. Ergo, how can the ODNI’s proclaimed insights about Iran’s capabilities and intentions be taken seriously?)
Now, however, self-delusion is intolerable. Given how close Iran is to producing weapons-grade fuel (if it is not there already), there must be scrutiny of its weaponization activities. Without that, it is not possible to assess how close the regime is to “break-out.”
The Biden–Harris administration won’t provide any such scrutiny, at least for public consumption, because “some uncomfortable truths would come out,” Albright and Burkhard explain. Namely: If it started today, Iran could produce a testable nuclear device “way too quickly.” The initial activities necessary to build a bomb would be hard to detect. If Iran has already completed all or most of them, it is now so close to weapons-grade fuel that it could actually produce a device before our bull-headed government finally, grudgingly conceded that it was trying to produce a device.
However tragic it might be to interrupt Congress’s summer vacation, it is imperative that lawmakers get answers from the administration about the state of U.S. intelligence on exactly what nuclear-weaponization activities Iran has engaged in — including, critically, gaps in our intelligence regarding strides we can nevertheless infer that Iran has taken.
Right before the Senate went on holiday, Senator Graham proposed a congressional authorization for the use of military force that would
be triggered if the president determines that Iran possesses uranium [that is] enriched to the weapons-grade level, a nuclear warhead, or . . . a delivery vehicle capable of delivering a nuclear device against Israel or other allies or the United States.
Admirably, the senator is straining to establish real deterrence. And look, having spent years pretending the mullahs had no nuclear-weapons program, rather than taking punitive measures with real teeth to halt the program, perhaps an effort to scare them is all our government has left at this late stage. But with the Biden–Harris administration turning a blind eye to Tehran’s machinations, and with Congress having left town without acting on Graham’s proposed AUMF or even demanding answers from the administration, how deterred can we really expect Tehran to be?
Obviously, President Biden was never serious about his commitment to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear-weapons power. Is anyone going to ask his would-be successor, Vice President Harris, what she plans to do about this threat? Of course, Donald Trump should be asked, too. But Trump is merely seeking office. Right this second, as Iran foments war against Israel in the Middle East — a war in which its proxies have repeatedly attacked American military targets — Harris is in office, the closest thing we have to a president.