Mishandling Iran and waffling on Afghanistan, too.

http://tinyurl.com/yhlgreo
Geneva: Big, Ominous Win for Iran By: Kenneth R. Timmerman...meeting in Geneva between the great powers and Iran delivered a big win for Iran, whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could go to bed that night once again truly believing "America can do nothing" — a phrase his mentor, Islamic revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, loved to repeat...Expectations ran high that Iran's representative would simply grandstand and use the talks to sermonize the United States, that we would walk out, and "crippling sanctions" would begin. But the Iranians played us masterfully. Instead of repeating Mr. Ahmadinejad's mantra that the nuclear issue was "off the table" and Iran would be happy to discuss the terms of our surrender, his representative, Saeed Jalali, bought precious time for Iran to continue its clandestine nuclear activities.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, set the standard for what the talks should have produced in remarks to a conference on Capitol Hill at the very moment our negotiating team was getting snookered by the Iranians.
"If our engagement with Iran is to have credibility, the parties need to emerge from the meeting in Geneva today with a set of clear and credible benchmarks for mutual steps forward and a timetable for meeting them," Mr. Lieberman said. "These benchmarks must include verifiable suspension of all enrichment activities, as repeatedly demanded by the U.N. Security Council, and full cooperation with the [International Atomic Energy Agency] to resolve all outstanding questions about Iran's nuclear-related activities."
None of that came out of Thursday's meeting with the five permanent Security Council members plus Germany (P5+1). Instead, the Iranians changed the subject. ...
****Even the revelation that Iran was cheating with another, secret nuclear site, hidden under a Revolutionary Guards base --and a mountain-- was handled ineptly by the West and by Obama especially, who didn't want to "spoil" his UN debut with nasty truth about Iran.****
http://tinyurl.com/yktyhkw
...President George W. Bush personally briefed select members of Congress who were closely tracking Iran’s nuclear weapons activities many months earlier.
Despite those briefings, not a word of the secret project leaked out, even as top Republicans in Congress blasted the CIA for what they considered to be a politically-skewed National Intelligence Estimate on Iran issued in December 2007 that concluded that Iran had shut down its nuclear weapons programs in 2003.
...a defector from the IRGC named Brig. Gen. Ali Reza Asghari provided key information on the Qom facility....French intelligence officials who interviewed Asghari found his information so credible and alarming that they took it to president Nicolas Sarkozy in September 2007...totally contradicted everything France and its allies had been hearing from the International Atomic Energy Agency and from the CIA about Iran’s nuclear programs.
...But Sarkozy’s stance on Iran, and his effort to generate international focus on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs, was undercut by a politically-charged National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran released by the National Intelligence Council in December 2007. That much-disputed NIE seemed to run counter to everything that Sarkozy and French intelligence had learned from General Asghari. It also challenged earlier CIA conclusions about the Iranian nuclear weapons program....after the NIE was released, Sarkozy dismissed it in an interview with the French newsweekly, Le Nouvel Observateur. “Everyone agrees that what the Iranians are doing has no civilian explanation,” he said....Some of the analysts who worked on the December 2007 NIE have told reporters that they felt an overwhelming sense of political responsibility in drafting their report: to make sure they didn’t give President George W. Bush an excuse for launching military strikes on Iran.****So they distorted the truth! Lying to the prejudice of national security used to be called treason and was punishable by death.**** Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger publicly chided the analysts who wrote the NIE for politicizing intelligence....He excoriated them for seeking to become “surrogate policy-makers and advocates,” instead of analysts. The goal of the analysts writing the NIE was widely seen as tying the hands of President George W. Bush on Iran and specifically taking a military option off the table....analyst Tom Fingar, who coordinated the NIE, told an audience at the New Americas Foundation that the Iran NIE had been written and rewritten by June 2007, but that he and other analysts weren’t pleased with it because it repeated earlier estimates that Iran was continuing to pursue nuclear weapons....Sources who read the 1,500 source notes to the 140-page report said that its most dramatic assertion was based on “a single, unvetted source,”...“That’s not what I told the CIA,” he said. “I didn’t tell them that the nuclear weapons program had been shut down, but that it was ongoing.”
...An intelligence community fact sheet on the Qom enrichment facility released by the White House recently claimed that the new information on Qom “does not contradict our 2007 assessment of Iran’s nuclear program.” ****Incredible! Aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, it was quite an enjoyable evening at the theater, wasn't it?****