NIE Analysis - "Nonpartisan" Is Code For "Neocon"

By Cernig

I missed this article at the time, but this is just f-ing hilarious. CQ Politics' national security editor, Jeff Stein, on Friday in an article entitled "Iran Intelligence Report: Garbage In, Garbage Out":

But the fact is that the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran never really said what many in the media (and antiwar camp) claimed it said — that Iran was out of the nukes game, had been for at least four years.

And the NIE’s implication that the flaming Islamic state had foresworn nukes altogether was equally absurd.

“In fact, the report contains the same sorts of flaws that we have learned to expect from our intelligence agency offerings,” wrote two nuclear proliferation experts in The New York Times opinion pages on Thursday, Dec. 6.

“It, like the report in 2002 that set up the invasion of Iraq, is both misleading and dangerous,” wrote Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, and Valerie Lincy, editor of the nonpartisan group’s Web site, Iranwatch.org.

(Here's the link to the original op-ed).

Why hilarious? Well, as Dr. Jeffrey Lewis points out, Milhollin's group don't have any credibility as expert witnesses. Indeed, their complaining about flaws in the intelligence that led to the Iraq invasion is sheer hypocrisy.

If you head over to the Iran Watch site you'll find a link to their older site - Iraq Watch. There you will find stuff like this from January 2003:

The only hope for inspections now is the last-minute conversion of Saddam Hussein. If troops begin massing on his border, there is a slim chance that Saddam will start answering Mr. Blix's questions. There is even less of a chance that Saddam will then begin to transparently disarm. But if he does, the "process" will be unmistakable. The world would then see Iraq behaving like South Africa when it revealed its entire nuclear-weapons program after its government changed; and as Argentina and Brazil did when they decided to become part of the solution to the proliferation problem rather than part of the cause; and as Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan did when they decided that nuclear weapons were not worth the cost of their keeping."

So remind me, why does the NYT think this guy's opinion is worth a sh*t? Stein at CQ, at least, should know better.

And nonpartisan? Don't make me laugh. Try his speech to the neocon American Enterprise Institute entitled "The International Atomic Energy Agency: The World's Enforcer or Paper Tiger?" and see if you think he's nonpartisan. Valerie Lincy appears to be joined at the hip to her illustrious neocon boss, although I did manage to find one puff piece which was about her rather than mentioning her as an adjunct to Milhollin.

Look, folks, you've got Google. Use it. If you see a name or an organisation you don't find familiar, take a second and find out. Otherwise the stenographers of the Fourth Estate will run rings around you by passing always-wrong War Party shills off as nonpartisan experts. That's your liberal media at work.