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People often ask me why, as a philosophy major, I ended up in this particular field. I was an epistemologist — someone who studied knowledge and justified belief. The art of intelligence is, in that way, a massive exercise in practical epistemology.

Today, Erroll Morris — a wonderful film-maker who shares my epistemological predilections — continues his wonderful discussion begun last month of the doctored Shahab-3 images, including a brief commentary on Colin Powell’s execrable UN presentation:

ERROL MORRIS: No. Not that I’m aware of. But doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.

[The photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 provide several examples. Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I’m not an aerial intelligence expert. I could be looking at anything. It is the labels, the captions, and the surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another.⁶

Photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003.Photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003. (U.S. Department of State)

Powell was arguing that the Iraqis were doing something wrong, knew they were doing something wrong, and were trying to cover their tracks. Later, it was revealed that the captions were wrong. There was no evidence of chemical weapons and no evidence of concealment.

Morris’s mockery of the sweeping interpretations made in Powell’s photographs.Reinterpretation of photographs presented by Colin Powell, by Daniel Mooney.

There is a larger point. I don’t know what these buildings were really used for. I don’t know whether they were used for chemical weapons at one time, and then transformed into something relatively innocuous, in order to hide the reality of what was going on from weapons inspectors. But I do know that the yellow captions influence how we see the pictures. “Chemical Munitions Bunker” is different from “Empty Warehouse” which is different from “International House of Pancakes.” The image remains the same but we see it differently.⁷

Change the yellow labels, change the caption and you change the meaning of the photographs. You don’t need Photoshop. That’s the disturbing part. Captions do the heavy lifting as far as deception is concerned. The pictures merely provide the window-dressing. The unending series of errors engendered by falsely captioned photographs are rarely remarked on. – E.M.]

⁶ The Times a year later ruefully admitted that the “intelligence” was in error. “According to the interviews conducted by The New York Times, the administration’s argument that Iraq was producing biological weapons was based almost entirely on human intelligence of unknown reliability. When mobile trailers were found by American troops, the White House and C.I.A. rushed out a white paper reporting that the vehicles were used to make biological agents. But later, an overwhelming majority of intelligence analysts concluded the vehicles were used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons or possibly to produce rocket fuel…” Powell’s Case, a Year Later: Gaps in Picture of Iraq Arms, by Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger, The New York Times, Feb. 1, 2004.

⁷ Powell’s words before the United Nations provide little justification beyond various appeals to authority:

“Let me say a word about satellite images before I show a couple. The photos that I am about to show you are sometimes hard for the average person to interpret, hard for me. The painstaking work of photo analysis takes experts with years and years of experience, poring for hours and hours over light tables. But as I show you these images, I will try to capture and explain what they mean, what they indicate, to our imagery specialists. Let’s look at one. This one is about a weapons munitions facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji. This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapons shells… Let me give you a closer look. Look at the image on the left. On the left is a close-up of one of the four chemical bunkers. The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions. The arrow at the top that says ’security’ points to a facility that is a signature item for this kind of bunker. Inside that facility are special guards and special equipment to monitor any leakage that might come out of the bunker. The truck you also see is a signature item. It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong. This is characteristic of those four bunkers. The special security facility and the decontamination vehicle will be in the area, if not at any one of them or one of the other, it is moving around those four and it moves as needed to move as people are working in the different bunkers.”

As much as I hate to say this, folks are misreading the most recent NIE. Yes it says that Iran halted its clandestine weapons program, at least for a time, in fall 2003. And, yes that suggests that Iran’s leaders are sensitive to pressure.

But the halt doesn’t given Iran a clean bill of health, it simply offers a path for Iran and the United States. I agree with SECDEF Gates’ excellent summary of the NIE and a substantial measure of US policy as he described it:

In reality, you cannot pick and choose only the conclusions you like of this recent National Intelligence Estimate. The report expresses with greater confidence than ever that Iran did have a nuclear weapons program – developed secretly, kept hidden for years, and in violation of its international obligations. It reports that they do continue their nuclear enrichment program, an essential long lead time component of any nuclear weapons program. It states that they do have the mechanisms still in place to restart their program. And, the estimate is explicit that Iran is keeping its options open and could restart its nuclear weapons program at any time – I would add, if it has not done so already. Although the Estimate does not say so, there are no impediments to Iran restarting its nuclear weapons program – none, that is, but the international community.

[snip]

Considering all this, the international community should demand that the Iranian government come clean about the extent of its past illegal nuclear weapons development. The international community should insist that Iran suspend enrichment. The international community should require that the Iranian government openly affirm that it does not intend to develop nuclear weapons in the future and, further, that it agree to inspection arrangements that will give us all confidence that it is adhering to that commitment.

It is so nice to have an adult in the Defense Department.

Where I part ways with the Administration — although this isn’t absolutely clear from policy as summarized — is in two areas:

• “Suspend enrichment” has no technical meaning. I would define “warm standby” — where the centrifuges spin empty — as sufficient to meet “suspend.” The Administration, so far, has not.

• “Inspection arrangements that will give us all confidence” that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons could be devised, in my opinion, to accept the reality of some centrifuge work in Iran — although the Administration is probably right to stick to the Russia proposal for at least a while longer.

Indeed, given that we cannot verify “zero” centrifuges without the Additional Protocol in force, I tend to value inspection arrangements more than proscribed activities in placing meaningful barriers between Iran’s bomb option and an actual bomb.

Update: Jonathan Schell has more.

Experimenting with the new media — here is a little blurb from the Drogin event yesterday.

I will let you know when we have something from the Iran NIE event with Steve and Flynt.

I am so psyched that, tomorrow, we have Bob Drogin coming to talk about his awesome book, Curveball.

Wild Pitch: Curveball and Selling the Iraq War

In 1999, a mysterious Iraqi applied for political asylum in Munich. The young chemical engineer offered compelling testimony of Saddam Hussein’s secret program to build weapons of mass destruction. He claimed that the dictator had constructed germ factories on trucks, creating a deadly hell on wheels. His German hosts passed along his account to their CIA counterparts, but denied CIA agents access to their star informant. The Americans dubbed him with an unforgettable code name: Curveball. After September 11, 2001, the Bush administration seized on Curveball’s account as evidence that Saddam’s government needed to be overthrown—in spite of numerous indicators that the informant’s credibility was unraveling. Bob Drogin answers the crucial question of the Iraq war: how and why was America’s intelligence so catastrophically wrong?

Bob Drogin is the national security correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He previously served for the Times in Asia and Africa, and as a national correspondent based in New York. He has won or shared multiple journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the George Polk Award.

Join the New America Foundation for an engaging discussion on intelligence failure in the run-up to the Iraq war, followed by a robust Q&A session led by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis.
Start: 12/04/2007 – 12:15pm
New America Foundation
1630 Connecticut Ave, NW 7th Floor
Washington, 20009
United States

Since I’ve been blogging talking and talking so much about Curveball and Bob Drogin’s excellent book of the same name, I thought I should link to the excellent document cache posted by our friends at the National Security Archive.

The Record On Curveball: Declassified Documents and Key Participants Show the Importance of Phony Intelligence in the Origins of the Iraq War, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 234, edited by John Prados, November 5, 2007.

PS: I think we are going to have Bob Drogin here at the New America Foundation to give a talk — probably December 4.

Details to follow.

This is Rafid Ahmed Alwan, better known as Curveball, getting down at an Iraqi wedding in 1993.

The 60 Minutes segment tonight, if you saw it after the Patriots-Colts game, was a fine introduction to Curveball and that damned wall.

But for the gory detail, I highly recommend Bob Drogin’s new book, Curveball: Spies, Lies and the Con Man Who Caused A War.

I am about 1/3 of the way through and its is pretty much awesome.

Friend of wonk Jackie Shire sends along this lament about the passing of the much maligned UNMOVIC:

With a whimper …

Jacqueline Shire

I should be in a good mood—it’s Friday and I have family coming this weekend for several birthdays and a cupcake taste test (long story involving my chef mother, and the relative merits of Magnolia Bakery vs. Cupcake Café’s buttercream icing).

But I’m not. Because the Security Council adopted a resolution today formally disbanding UNMOVIC, the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Inspection Commission.

Of course the hunt for Iraq’s WMD is over. Denied a role in the post-war WMD search, UNMOVIC inspectors have been working away at UN headquarters, in ever dwindling numbers, continuing to examine satellite imagery and issue quarterly reports to the Security Council. Not that their efforts should be laughably dismissed—they have warned persuasively, for example, of the risks posed by poorly secured chemical and biological weapons sites and the insurgents who one imagines would love to find a little forgotten but still potent mustard agent. The final word on UNMOVIC’s work is contained in a giant 1,000-page compendium, which Ewen Buchanan promises is “bold and honest” with no attempt to “shy away from the mistakes and difficulties encountered” by inspectors.

The loss of UNMOVIC is meaningful in a larger sense. Here is a collection of skilled experts with experience in WMD monitoring, inspections and verification, and whose pre-war assessments of Iraq’s WMD programs were, need anyone be reminded, untainted by dogma and gulp, accurate. There are the calls for establishing a permanent UN body to monitor WMD. Richard Butler’s op-ed in today’s NYT mentions a report by the United Nations Association and Canada’s Trevor Findlay, whose Center for Treaty Compliance has called for a standing UN verification body. The problem, of course, is the U.S. allergy to multilateral institutions with the word verification anywhere in their mandate.

Perhaps the speed with which this resolution was tabled and brought to a vote (two months, or lightening speed in UN time), has caught the arms control and nonproliferation crowd off guard. Reportedly, Ambassador Khalilzad promised the Iraqi government that revoking the UNMOVIC mandate would be high on his agenda when he arrived at the UN. Iraq wants to close this chapter and retrieve its escrow money from the old oil-for-food accounts which were paying UNMOVIC’s bills. Sadly, there have been no accompanying efforts to forge a new identity for UNMOVIC.

So this weekend, in between birthday toasts, I will offer a quiet one to all the current and former UNSCOM and UNMOVIC inspectors, staff and supporters.

Sadly, our friends over at ThinkProgress chose to focus on the partisan aspect about the decision to shutter UNMOVIC, with commentators expressing a little too much glee over the final failure to find significant evidence of proscribed weapons activity in Iraq.

Our friend Michael Roston forwarded the ThinkProgress post to me, asking “Is this really a good thing?”

No, man, it sucks.

This blog has long supported a different approach—Hans Blix’s proposal to keep UNMOVIC’s talent together as sort of an international verification team for biological weapons and missiles that would complement chemical and nuclear expertise maintained by the OPCW and IAEA.

Dismantling UNMOVIC just means that we get to reinvent the wheel with future ad hoc inspectorates, something we may regret in the event North Korea agrees to shutter its missile programs as the Clinton Administration had sought.

UNMOVIC had a good track record. Among other things, these are the guys who figured out “Curveball” was full of it.

This blog, of course, wasn’t alone in recognizing the value that UNMOVIC retained. Other proposals to keep around UNMOVIC included:

• Joseph Cirincione, Jessica T. Mathews, George Perkovich, with Alexis Orton, WMD IN IRAQ: Evidence and Implications (January 2003).

• Frank Ronald Cleminson, Modelling a New International Regime for Monitoring and Verification of Compliance: Drawing from Experience in Iraq 1991-2004 (2004)

• FAS Working Group on Biological and Chemical Weapons, UNMOVIC Could Help Resolve Future Biological Weapons Crises (August 2003).

• Trevor Findlay. “Preserving UNMOVIC: The Institutional Possibilities,” Disarmament Diplomacy 76 (March/April 2004).

• Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, “Enforcing WMD treaties: consolidating a UN role,” Disarmament Diplomacy 75 (January/February 2004).

• Terence Taylor, “Lessons from UNSCOM and UNMOVIC,” Disarmament Diplomacy 75 (January/February 2004).

So, I am reading my copy of George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm.

I turn to the account of the strike on Dora Farm first. Tenet offers the standard account—embellished by an odd new detail here, an occasional defense of his own role there—when Tenet says that “targets were being passed to B-2s …”

Wait a minute.

Then a couple of sentences later, “a number of bombs from the B-2s …”

The strike at Dora Farm—according to every other source including Plan of Attack, Cobra II, The Iraq War, and American Soldier—was conducted with F-117s.

Adam Hebert in Air Force Magazine profiled the strike and the pilots— Lt. Col. David F. Toomey III and Maj. Mark J. Hoehn—complete with pictures of the planes landing after the mission.

The F-117 isn’t just a passing detail, either, in most accounts. Air Force personnel had developed a novel way to drop a pair of bunker busters from a single plane, had already loaded one aircraft when the intelligence came in, dramatically reduced mission planning time and executed a very daring strike. The Air Force performed superbly, and in all the accounts of that performance the aircraft were F-117s.

So, I guess what I am saying is, this looks an awful lot like a careless error in a book that is supposed to form the basis of Tenet’s defense of himself.

Not a good start.

I guess I am just feeling defensive of the F-117 because I’ve been reading Ben Rich’s memoir, Skunk Works, about the development of the stealth fighter.

A couple of posts about his circus tent are here. It’s worth it for the picture.

Two of them are out.

There’s one comparing the IC’s prewar assessments with the postwar results on the ground and another about the IC’s use of INC-provided information.