Hope is about as pointless as despair

Avedon wonders about the point of carrying on against overwhelming opposition.

There is a reason why the RAND group and the rest of the Company rate environmentalists, anti-corporatists and dissident elements as the worst terrorist threats the government faces, even though they've really done nothing compared to the religious fundamentalists.

It's because to the Company, we are the greatest threat to their subversion of the Constitution.

Just remember that when you despair. You are the greatest threat in the world to the mind of Dick Cheney. If that doesn't motivate you to action, nothing will.

Chris Dodd filibusters against telcom immunity and FISA today, and it looks like telcom Harry is poised to smack him down. Show Chris some love. Tell your Senator to help him. Tell telcom Harry to go Cheney himself, but politely. Big Brother is listening.

You don't have time for hopelessness.

Sometimes there's just no point in giving up.

Good Words

Via Atrios:

Edwards:...I think that if we're going to have serious change in this country, universal health care, attacking global warming, a tax policy that works for most Americans instead of just a few, a trade policy that creates jobs instead of costing jobs, I mean, all those things are going to require us to have a president of the United States who's tough and willing to fight these powerful corporate interests that stand between us and the change that we need.

And I think the notion that you can sit at the table and negotiate and compromise, and these powerful interests will give away their power, I think is a fantasy. If it were true, it would have been working over the last few decades. And it does not.

I think we have a huge fight, an epic fight on our hands against those powerful interests, not against politicians. Nobody cares about politicians fighting. But I think we need a president who's tough enough to take these people on and win, and I've been doing it my whole life.

Actually his financial records are relatively clean.

Listening to the Silent Majority

Glenn Greenwald points to

A new survey of American Jewish opinion, released by the American Jewish Committee, demonstrates several important propositions: (1) right-wing neocons (the Bill Kristol/Commentary/ AIPAC/Marty Peretz faction) who relentlessly claim to speak for Israel and for Jews generally hold views that are shared only by a small minority of American Jews; (2) viewpoints that are routinely demonized as reflective of animus towards Israel or even anti-Semitism are ones that are held by large majorities of American Jews; and (3) most American Jews oppose U.S. military action in the Middle East -- including both in Iraq and against Iran.

It is beyond dispute that American Jews overwhelmingly oppose core neoconservative foreign policy principles. Hence, in large numbers, they disapprove of the way the U.S. is handling its "campaign against terrorism" (59-31); overwhelmingly believe the U.S. should have stayed out of Iraq (67-27); believe that things are going "somewhat badly" or "very badly" in Iraq (76-23); and believe that the "surge" has either made things worse or has had no impact (68-30)...

Which doesn't stop the Company-owned Israeli government from dissing the viewpoint of opposing factions in the intelligence community.

So, where's the vocal dissent if the majority is opposed to the will of a militant minority?

Aside from the fact that the telcom-owned main$tream has adopted the view that if they don't report on the trees falling in the forest, or the bodies falling in Iraq, no one will hear, there's another factor at work.

It's the same factor that owns telcom Harry, and drives him to override Chris Dodd's hold to bring the FISA bill on telcom immunity to the Senate floor.

It's the same factor that constantly tells Americans they have to give the telcoms everything they want, and let them and their American government proxies widen their surveillance and restrict American freedom even more.

(or is it the other way around- it's getting hard to tell who is whom's handpuppet)

But as reported, now the Authorities are using their eavesdropping capabilities as never before, perhaps because now they don't have to deal with bothersome things like search warrants or informing a court of their actions.

There's nothing harder escape than tyranny from the bottom up, because the elitists on top have such an investment in it.

The Israeli or the American silent majorities are being listened to, alright. And the silent majority knows it. They're being listened to, and their names are being noted, in lists that is so large the silent majority figures it's useless.

But it will be used, and even if subconsciously the silent majority knows it. Although they'd deny it put that way, because the idea sounds like paranoia. Big Brother will lower his yoke on a case-by-case individual basis. Broad nets are so much easier to escape than, say, your credit rating.

Another Company War

The strife emerging in Bolivia has all the traits of yet another CIA-instigated revolution in Latin America:

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia — “Against narco-communism,” reads one line of graffiti in this city in the lowlands of Bolivia. “To arms, Cruceños,” reads another, calling on residents to fight the government of President Evo Morales, who put the armed forces on alert this week as four eastern provinces move toward greater autonomy.

Elsewhere in South America, such calls might be dismissed as mere bombast. But not in Bolivia, where fears of political violence are intensifying in Santa Cruz, a bastion of opposition to Mr. Morales, a former coca grower and the nation’s first indigenous president.

“They call us reactionaries, but we have a lot to react against,” said Wilson Salas Pinto, 43, a director of the Bolivian Socialist Falange, a right-wing group here whose members wear black berets and parade with their hands in the air à la Mussolini. “Evo wants to transplant Cuban Communism to Bolivia. We’re prepared to resist that project.”

Upon first glance at the ethnic tensions here, it is easy to focus on increasingly vocal fringe groups like the Falange. A counterpart on the left is the Ponchos Rojos, or Red Ponchos, indigenous activists from the high plains who recently slit the throats of two dogs before television cameras as a warning to those who resist Mr. Morales’s plans.

Eastern Bolivia’s clash with the president, however, is far more complex. Leaders here have long chafed at the influence of the capital, La Paz, but recent moves by Mr. Morales, who has received substantial financial and political support from President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, have added to concerns over power consolidation.

The sudden moves this week to seek greater autonomy came after the president’s supporters rushed last weekend to approve a new Constitution, despite an opposition boycott of their assembly. They had abruptly switched the vote to the city of Oruro, a Morales stronghold, from Sucre, which had been racked by street protests.

Even Mr. Morales’s critics acknowledge that the new charter, which must be approved in a public referendum, has positive aspects — it would, for example, abolish child labor. But they are also alarmed by efforts to increase indigenous power, like items to guarantee representation of Indians in Congress or to allow Indians to mete out justice outside the judicial system. Another measure would allow Mr. Morales to run for re-election to a second five-year term...

Political power is one issue dividing the country. Petroleum is another. Most of the natural gas and oil in Bolivia, which has South America’s second-largest natural gas reserves after Venezuela, is produced in the east.

But Mr. Morales recently moved to use some petroleum royalties to finance new cash payments to the elderly, an attempt to forge a social security system for his nation, one of Latin America’s poorest. This plan would deprive provinces in the east of revenue used for works like bridges, roads and schools.

Much of the power over petroleum remains in the president’s hands, and left-leaning leaders in Argentina and Brazil, the main buyers of Bolivian gas, are not about to make deals with Santa Cruz. This leaves the province in need of something other than independence...

It's the oil again, the dead giveaway.

If you don't have time to read Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes" you owe it to yourself to read Chalmers Johnson's review of it to open your eyes to the way that secret wars work.

Rated "R" for Metaphysics

"Youth Without Youth":

...It is a complex assemblage (closer to phoenix than swan), and by turns bewitching, inspiring, enervating and confounding. The unlikely source material is a novella by Mircea Eliade, a prolific, Romanian-born historian of religion (1907-86), who wrote about myth, ritual, yoga, shamanism and folklore and, among other pursuits, charted the divide between how time is experienced by so-called primitive man (cyclically) and his modern counterpart (linearly). For Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), the Romanian question mark at the center of Mr. Coppola’s adaptation of the Eliade novella, time doesn’t begin here and end there (despite the film’s opening and closing credits); it swirls like wind-scattered leaves...

“Youth Without Youth” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence, sexual congress, female nudity, metaphysics.

Only in Bu$hCo 'Merika are gun violence, sexual congress, female nudity, and metaphysics equally the target of censors...

Gitmo dot mil Trolling Wikipedia Again

Wikileaks spots another covert op:

WASHINGTON--The US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has been caught conducting covert propaganda attacks on the internet. The attacks, exposed this week in a report by the government transparency group Wikileaks, include deleting detainee ID numbers from Wikipedia last month, the systematic posting of unattributed "self praise" comments on news organization web sites in response to negative press, boosting pro-Guantanamo stories on the internet news site Digg and even modifying Fidel Castro's encyclopedia article to describe the Cuban president as "an admitted transexual"...

Check out the evidence if you're technically oriented.

Check the rest of the story out regardless.

Wikileaks is exactly the kind of watchdog the Company wants to label "domestic Terra'ism" and shut down.

Irony isn't the Word

Hypocrisy, is.

Yesterday, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) attacked the nine “liberal Democrat” “naysayers” who voted against his resolution on the “importance of Christmas and the Christian faith.” Today, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) responded, explaining his vote:

"While the Republicans are passing a resolution celebrating Christmas, the president was vetoing health care for children. There’s a little bit of irony going on around here."

King was one of the lawmakers who voted against expanding SCHIP.

I had the honor of voting for Jim McDermott many years ago.

It's good to see he's still slugging away.

Good Question

Avedon:

What we need is a concerted campaign to demand of our Democratic "leaders" an answer to the question: "What is the real reason you are so cowardly and unwilling to hold this administration to account and stop the bleeding?" What is the real reason that "impeachment is off the table"? What is the real reason why you keep passing bills that make America into a dictatorship, continue the disastrous occupation of Iraq, and piss off the whole country? Why are you such wimps?

Could it be blackmail?

Could it be profit?

Could it be some combination of the above?

Could be... but try to stay out of small airplanes if you can prove it.

Also, let me include her link to a new post by Arthur Silber on obedience to the zombie urge, and his post concerning DINOcrat motivations:

...The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans, that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture, and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home. That is what we stand for.

And who says otherwise? The Democrats could -- and the most forceful means of doing so, the only method that is appropriate to this historic moment, the method that is absolutely required if we are to turn away from this catastrophic, murderous course, is impeachment. That is the one method the Democrats will categorically, absolutely not utilize -- because the Democrats are a crucial, inextricable part of the identical authoritarian-corporatist system that has led us to these horrors. They have all worked toward this end over many decades, Democrats and Republicans alike, and now the horrors manifest themselves explicitly, without apology, even with the sickening boastfulness of the mass murderer who is proud of what he has done, and who vehemently believes he is right.

So the dare goes unanswered. These horrors are what the United States now stands for.

As far as the zombies are concerned, anyway.

It's not just the NSA anymore!

Every site you look at on the worldwide web, available for whoever wants to pay:

...CenturyTel Inc., a Monroe, La., phone company that provides Internet access and long-distance calling services, is facing stiff competition from cellphone companies and cable operators. So to diversify, it's getting into the online-advertising business.

And not just any online advertising. The technology it's using could change the way the $16.9 billion Internet ad market works, bringing in a host of new players -- and giving consumers fresh concerns about their privacy.

CenturyTel's system allows it to observe and analyze the online activities of its Internet customers, keeping tabs on every Web site they visit. The equipment is made by a Silicon Valley start-up called NebuAd Inc. and installed right into the phone company's network. NebuAd takes the information it collects and offers advertisers the chance to place online ads targeted to individual consumers. NebuAd and CenturyTel get paid whenever a consumer clicks on an ad.

This technique -- called behavioral targeting -- is far more customized than the current method of selling ads online. Today, it's an imperfect process: companies such as Revenue Science Inc. and Tacoda Inc., which was recently bought by Time Warner Inc., contract with Web sites to monitor which consumers visit them, attaching "cookies," or small pieces of tracking data, to visitors' hard drives so they are recognized when they return. The targeting firms feed the data to Web site owners, who use it to charge premium rates for customized ads. But the information is limited, since the tracking companies can't monitor all of the sites an individual visits.

The newer form of behavioral targeting involves placing gear called "deep-packet inspection boxes" inside an Internet provider's network of pipes and wires. Instead of observing only a select number of Web sites, these boxes can track all of the sites a consumer visits, and deliver far more detailed information to potential advertisers...

Or anyone else.

You bet, the opportunities for outsourcing contracts from the Feds are endless.

Not to mention the potentional for the entrepreneurial selling of all those credit card numbers they intercept to whomever for whatever.

Free enterprise at work, touching me somewhere.

And you wonder why the neighbors don't visit.

This plot shows over one and a half million of the brightest stars and galaxies in the nearby universe detected by the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) in infrared light. The resulting image is an incredible tapestry of stars and galaxies that provides limits on how the universe formed and evolved. Across the center are stars that lie in the plane of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Away from the Galactic plane, vast majority of the dots are galaxies, color coded to indicate distance, with blue dots representing the nearest galaxies in the 2Mass survey, and red dots indicating the most distant survey galaxies that lie at a redshift near 0.1. Named structures are annotated. Many galaxies are gravitationally bound together to form clusters, which themselves are loosely bound into superclusters, which in turn are sometimes seen to align over even larger scale structures.

A Sound of Blunder

He's Baaacckk

The Stupidest Man on Earth speaks at the AEI:

A former top Pentagon official blamed the Bush administration's top official in Iraq for abandoning a plan for a quick transition to Iraqi leadership in the summer of 2003 and instead keeping the U.S. government in control of the country for more than a year.

The decision to carry out "a lengthy occupation was, I believe, the single biggest mistake the United States made in Iraq," said Douglas J. Feith, who as undersecretary of defense for policy was a key figure in the drive to war...

[thanks to Laura Rozen for the tip]

No, the mistake was listening to the likes of you and going there in the first place, fool. But who's the bigger fool, him or the fool that listens to him?

Actually, the real mistake occurred when John Bolton's "white collar riot" went unchallenged in the 2000 abortive recounts in Miami. We should have settled it then and there. But that would have been UnCivil, wouldn't it?

MoDo gives him the heave-ho today, too:

The man crowned by Tommy Franks as “the dumbest [expletive] guy on the planet” just made the dumbest [expletive] speech on the planet.

Doug Feith, the former Rummy gofer who drove the neocon plan to get us into Iraq, and then dawdled without a plan as Iraq crashed into chaos, was the headliner at a reunion meeting of the wooly-headed hawks Monday night at the American Enterprise Institute.

The room was packed as the former No. 3 at the Pentagon, previewing his upcoming book, “War and Decision,” conceded that the case could be made that “mistakes were made.” His former boss, Paul Wolfowitz, and the former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle sat supportively in the front row.

But he wasn’t self-flagellating. He was simply trying to put an egghead gloss on his Humpty Dumpty mishegoss.

“At the end of the day, here we are, and as of now there’s a reasonable chance that the country is going to remain united,” he said. Not quite the original boast of democracy cascading through the Middle East.

Feith also inanely noted that his personal view was that his de-Baathification policy — which created a huge, angry pool of unemployed men that fueled the insurgency — “was not basically a big error. It’s been criticized very severely. I think there actually was a lot of good thought that went into the de-Baathification policy.” It just spiralled out of hand, he said. Mistakes were made.

He thinks everything would have been fine if America had not lingered so long in Iraq. If only Paul Bremer and the generals had just turned Iraq over to the slippery con man Feith wanted to put in charge, Ahmad Chalabi.

Asked about getting tough with Iran and Syria, Feith offered this incandescent insight: “As we all know, the president said he’s The Decider. That actually is quite a profound point. The president is The Decider and the main thing he decides about is risk.”

He noted that in battles through American history, “the military fights better over time.” This from a guy who sent our military into Iraq without the right armor, the right force numbers or the right counterinsurgency training.

“A strategic alliance of the ousted Baathists and foreign jihadists was something that our intelligence community did not anticipate,” he said, continuing to spread the blame.

But the intelligence community didn’t miss it. The neocons tried to scrub out that sort of analysis, knowing it would make the war harder to sell.

Classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council warned that rogue elements of Saddam’s government could hook up with existing terrorist groups to wage guerrilla warfare.

In “Fiasco,” Tom Ricks wrote that Feith’s Pentagon office was dubbed the “black hole” of policy by generals watching him drop the ball.

“People working for Feith complained that he would spend hours tweaking their memos, carefully mulling minor points of grammar,” Ricks wrote. “A Joint Staff officer recalled angrily that at one point troops sat on a runway for hours, waiting to leave the United States on a mission, while he quibbled about commas in the deployment order.”

Jay Garner, America’s first viceroy in Iraq, deemed him “incredibly dangerous” and said his “electrons aren’t connected.”

Feith’s disdain for diplomacy and his credo that weakness invites aggression were shaped, Ricks reported, by personal history: “Like Wolfowitz, Feith came from a family devastated by the Holocaust. His father lost both parents, three brothers, and four sisters to the Nazis.”

Feith told Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker that “My family got wiped out by Hitler, and ... all this stuff about working things out — well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn’t make any sense to me. The kind of people who put bumper stickers on their car that declare that ‘War is not the answer,’ are they making a serious comment? What’s the answer to Pearl Harbor? What’s the answer to the Holocaust?”

What’s the answer to bin Laden? According to Feith, it was an attack on an unrelated dictator. He oversaw the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, whose mission was to amp up links between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

It defies reason, but there are still some who think the chuckleheads who orchestrated the Iraq misadventure have wisdom to impart.

The Pentagon neocons dumped Condi Rice out of the loop. Yet, according to Newsweek’s Mike Isikoff, Condi has now offered Wolfie a job. It wasn’t enough that he trashed Iraq and the World Bank. (He’s still larking around town with Shaha, the sweetheart he gave the sweetheart deal to.)

Condi wants Wolfie to advise her on nuclear proliferation and W.M.D. as part of a State Department panel that has access to highly classified intelligence.

Once you’ve helped distort W.M.D. intelligence to trick the country into war, shouldn’t you be banned for life from ever having another top-level government post concerning W.M.D.?

Only if the government wants to avoid wars, and the evidence suggests it is still quite an avid fan of them.

The principal difference among the different factions seems to be on whether we need to bother winning the wars we fight or not.

Clearly, it all depends on what the meaning of 'is' is.

Ask a Silly Question

Larisa Alexandrovna:

We are told that the CIA tapes were destroyed in 2005. Now, what tapes are these DOJ lawyers examining in September and October of 2007? Please take a look at this memo, HERE, do you see anything that says that the tapes were a). destroyed and b). in 2005?

I am sure someone has a logical answer to this. I am, unfortunately, not that person. Anyone?

Simple. The tapes were destroyed, but not before Li'l Boots had 'em made into a DVD for Uncle Dick's Xmas present.

And no, Sparky, I do NOT have the primary reference for that assertion.

Concern for his Base

Krugman:

...Mr. Paulson’s actions reflect the priorities of the administration he serves. And that, ultimately, is what’s wrong with the mortgage relief plan he unveiled last week.

The plan is, as a Times editorial put it yesterday, “too little, too late and too voluntary.” But from the administration’s point of view these failings aren’t bugs, they’re features.

In fact, there’s a growing consensus among financial observers that the Paulson plan isn’t mainly intended to achieve real results. The point is, instead, to create the appearance of action, thereby undercutting political support for actual attempts to help families in trouble.

In particular, the Paulson plan is probably an attempt to take the wind out of Barney Frank’s sails. Mr. Frank, the Democratic chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has sponsored legislation that would give judges in bankruptcy cases the ability to rewrite mortgage loan terms. But “Bankers Hope Bush Subprime Plan Will Scuttle House Bill,” as a headline in CongressDaily put it.

As Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard bankruptcy expert, puts it, “The administration’s subprime mortgage plan is the bank lobby’s dream.” Given the Bush record, that should come as no surprise.

There are, in fact, three distinct concerns associated with the rising tide of foreclosures in America.

One is financial stability: as banks and other institutions take huge losses on their mortgage-related investments, the financial system as a whole is getting wobbly.

Another is human suffering: hundreds of thousands, and probably millions, of American families will lose their homes.

Finally, there’s injustice: the subprime boom involved predatory lending — high-interest loans foisted on borrowers who qualified for lower rates — on an epic scale. The Wall Street Journal found that more than 55 percent of subprime loans made at the height of the housing bubble “went to people with credit scores high enough to often qualify for conventional loans with far better terms.”

And in a declining housing market, these victims are stuck, unable to refinance.

So there are three problems. But Mr. Paulson’s plan — or, to use its official name, the Hope Now Alliance plan — is entirely focused on reducing investor losses. Any minor relief it might provide to troubled borrowers is clearly incidental. And it is does nothing for the victims of predatory lending...

Without Plausible Deniability

Lambert:

Well, I guess now I know why impeachment was “off the table.”...

Since the voters put them back in power, the Democrats have taken impeachment off the table, punted on the war, never figured out a way to hold Republicans accountable for filibusters and obstructionism, so legislation is in the toilet, and never managed to use oversight power to do anything more than chip away around the edges of the Bush regime—though they have written a great number of Sternly Worded Letters.

And now, top Democrats turn out to be enablers of war crimes by our lawless executive. What a surprise. Harry, Nancy, nice work.

DINOcrats are a great deal for the Company. They're so inexpensively bought.

...and it's like digby says. It's complicity and its release, like xan says, is likely timed in a Rovian synchronicity. It may also have been used to blackmail the DINOcrat "leadership" into taking impeachment off of the table.

Among other things...

Yet Another Company Faction Forms

Cliff Schecter points to a meeting between Erik Prince, head of Blackwater, and GOP Congressional leaders including Rep. [Patrick] McHenry [R-N.C.] .

Apparently the record of the meeting was scrubbed soon after it was posted.

Although Blackwater has the itchiest trigger fingers in Iraq, it's important to remember the number of mercenaries in Iraq outnumbers the American troops. Nor can it be considered the top billing contractor in Iraq.

Cheneyburton's KBR tops that list.

But virtually every one of the companies providing guns and intelligence for hire has ties to the American government. In fact, they're all compettitors for Uncle Sugar's largesse. Every one of them has a financial stake in Empire.

They're the ones that run American intelligence. So if, for example, the CIA appears to be pulling the rug out from under their Dear Leader, it's not simply a turf war in D.C.

It's the Praetorian Guard having a dialog with Li'l Boots, having decided there's no way to turn profit from Iran.

And they're coming home to keep an eye on you, because there's lots more money in that.

And the parting on the Left is now parting on the right

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

...lately Mr. Obama has been stressing his differences with his rivals by attacking their plans from the right — which means that he has been giving credence to false talking points that will be used against any Democratic health care plan a couple of years from now.

First is the claim that a mandate is unenforceable. Mr. Obama’s advisers have seized on the widely cited statistic that 15 percent of drivers are uninsured, even though insurance is legally required.

But this statistic is known to be seriously overstated — and some states have managed to get the number of uninsured drivers down to as little as 2 percent. Besides, while the enforcement of car insurance mandates isn’t perfect, it does greatly increase the number of insured drivers.

Anyway, why talk about car insurance rather than looking at direct evidence on how health care mandates perform? Other countries — notably Switzerland and the Netherlands — already have such mandates. And guess what? They work.

The second false claim is that people won’t be able to afford the insurance they’re required to have — a claim usually supported with data about how expensive insurance is. But all the Democratic plans include subsidies to lower-income families to help them pay for insurance, plus a promise to increase the subsidies if they prove insufficient...

I'll give you something someone else said who started on the left



...and parted on the right:

"Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable"

Guesswork, Inference, and DisInformation

I'll take one assessment from Team A and two from Team B with a side order of Team C's ideas, please. But hold off on the heavy meme.

An op-ed (because everything there is an op-ed) The Asia Pravda, supported by Team Xinhua:

The flip side to US intelligence

By Jacob Heilbrunn

With the release of the new intelligence estimate debunking the claim that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is earning laurels for puncturing the George W Bush administration's alarms about Tehran's intentions.

But is its new report really any more reliable than its original 2005 estimate, which declared that Iran was marching briskly towards attaining nuclear status? A look at the history of CIA estimates suggests that caution is in order. While estimates are only that - not, as is sometimes assumed, ironclad statements - and the difficulties of assessing clandestine programs are obvious, in no area has American intelligence gotten it wrong more often than when it comes to assessing foreign powers' nuclear prowess.

The CIA's first blunder established the pattern. In 1946, the CIA's Office of Reports and Estimates confidently predicted that Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union was years away from producing a bomb: "It is probable that the capability of the USSR to develop weapons based on atomic energy will be limited to the possible development of an atomic bomb to the stage of production at some time between 1950 and 1953. On this assumption, a quantity of such bombs could be produced and stockpiled by 1956." On August 24, 1949, the office again declared that Stalin would most likely not be able to field an atomic bomb until mid-1953. Five days later, the Soviet Union conducted its first atomic test.

The Office of Reports and Estimates was supposed to prevent a repetition of the blunders and failure to organize intelligence that occurred before Pearl Harbor. Instead, its egregious mistakes, including failing to predict the beginning of the Korean War, meant that it was abolished in 1950. According to CIA historian Donald P Steury, "It had been the object of repeated investigations, all of which condemned its failures without reservation."

In the 1950s, the CIA also failed to anticipate how quickly the Soviet Union would detonate a hydrogen bomb. It began to reverse course, perhaps partly as a result of these embarrassments. Where it had previously downplayed Soviet progress, the agency now exaggerated it. Aware that the Soviets were tapping into the expertise of captured German scientists, the CIA concluded that a missile gap existed between the US and the Soviet Union. Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev had claimed, in the wake of the 1957 Sputnik success, that the USSR was producing missiles "like sausages".

The CIA took him at his word. According to Sidney Graybeal, who was a CIA analyst at the time, "The estimates were based on capabilities rather than hard facts." They were also wrong. After John F Kennedy became president, satellite photography revealed not only that there wasn't a missile gap, but that the US was far ahead in the arms race, one reason that the Soviets backed down during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

A new round of contention erupted in the mid-1970s. Neo-conservatives, led by Albert Wohlstetter, Richard Pipes and other members of the Committee on the Present Danger, charged that the CIA was tailoring its estimates on behalf of detente and soft-pedaling the size of the Soviet missile force.

The famous Team B that challenged the CIA's Team A charged, in what critics later claimed was an anticipation of the bogus claims made in the run-up to the Gulf War, that the USSR was on the march and that the CIA was all wet. Who got it right? In retrospect, the hawks wildly exaggerated the power and coherence of the Soviet Union, but it does seem clear that the Soviet Union was pouring vastly more resources into the military than the CIA had realized. (In addition, the CIA had rather amusingly concluded in the 1970s that East Germany was one of the top ten economies in the world. It remains an economic basket-case today.)

If the CIA had difficulties judging the Soviet Union, it also badly bungled its assessment of another country's capabilities. In the 1950s, Israel's Shimon Peres began dickering with France to obtain nuclear technology. In order to weaken Egypt, then supporting an anti-French insurgency in Algeria, Paris began helping Israel develop nuclear technology. It took the CIA until 1960 to realize that Israel was building a bomb in Dimona. John F Kennedy successfully pressured Ben-Gurion into allowing a team of Americans to inspect the facility there, but they saw what they wanted to see, being unable to find any evidence that it was something other than a peaceful project.

The CIA report on the failure to identify the Dimona project earlier has a familiar ring. It stated: "The general feeling that Israel could not achieve this capability without outside aid from the US or its allies ... led to the tendency to discount rumors of Israeli reactor construction and French collaboration in the nuclear weapons area."

Then there was India. In 1998 New Delhi conducted three nuclear tests. Once again, the CIA was caught napping. According to the May 18, 1998 Washington Post, "six hours before the tests, no CIA warning was issued because the US analysts responsible for tracking the Indian nuclear program had not expected the tests and were not on alert". Congress was apoplectic. "Our failure to detect this shows that India did a good job of concealing their intentions, while we did a dreadfully inadequate job of detecting those intentions", said Senator Richard Shelby, then chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. In response, the CIA could only state the obvious: "It is apparent that the Indians went to some lengths to conceal their activities and intentions."

Is it that surprising, then, that the intelligence community has found Iraq and Iran to be so vexing? When it came to Iraq, American intelligence agencies radically underestimated the progress that Saddam Hussein had made before the first Gulf War toward a nuclear bomb. This was one of the reasons that it then reversed course before the second Gulf War, furnishing the Bush Administration with what it wanted in the National Intelligence Estimate released in 2003. That document infamously declared, "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

Now, in the midst of Bush's mutterings about a possible World War III with Tehran, the CIA has performed a somersault on Iran. Opponents of bombing Iran have seized on the latest estimate to discredit Bush, while neo-conservatives like Norman Podhoretz splutter that it represents a dastardly CIA plot to undermine Bush. Neo-conservative distaste for the CIA is longstanding.

Unless, of course Cheneyburton's Team 'Merika wrote the intelligence.

...It has been voiced by Laurie Mylroie, who believes that Saddam Hussein was behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center; David Frum and Richard Perle, in their book An End to Evil, present the CIA as a subversive institution intent on sabotaging the fight against terrorism. In a sense, such inanities signal that neo-conservatism, which started out as a Trotskyist movement vociferously opposed to American government institutions, has now come full circle.

Neither the boosters of the new report nor its detractors really have it right. The rapidity with which the CIA has reversed course on Iran should itself induce circumspection. Dealing with Iran diplomatically may well be the best option, but the latest intelligence report shouldn't serve as the final verdict on its nuclear intentions. Deciding how best to deal with Iran cannot rest on a single estimate that likely represents guesswork and inferences more than verifiable information.

In the final analysis, it is the duty of every citizen to be an intelligence analyst.

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