JOHN D MCHUGH/AFP/Getty Images

Canadian troops may have finally stopped handing off detainees to the Afghan authorities. That policy—always suspect from a human rights perspective—was the product of twin realities. First, NATO states such as Canada hated the optics of handing detainees to the Americans, what with Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo still on people's minds. Second, the Canadians, British, and Dutch troops fighting in southern Afghanistan had no desire to get into the detention business themselves.

The solution? Shuffle off detainees to the Afghans and pretend that the treatment they're getting is better than they'd get with the Americans. The policy protects delicate European sensibilities but does little to safeguard prisoners or to help NATO get good intelligence on Taliban activities (though I have been told by people in the know that captured Taliban fighters occasionally "fall off" NATO trucks and end up in American hands).

The issue of prisoners in Afghanistan has always struck me as a nettlesome problem that could easily become an important opportunity. My suggestion? Create a jointly run NATO/Afghan detention center in Kandahar or some other locale in southern Afghanistan. Use the detention center to simultaneously train Afghan police and interrogators (which we're doing anyway) and to hash out a common NATO policy on detention that can ease suspicions within the alliance while producing at least some actionable intelligence.

Thus far, American obstinacy and European fecklessness have scuppered common sense solutions. It's well past time to work together.

Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) thinks the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran ain't right. "We just see politics injected into this," his spokesman, Tory Mazzola, says. "When it comes to national security we really need to remove politics." The way Ensign plans to "remove politics" is by—wait for it—creating a panel of politicians, House and Senate members, to rewrite the intelligence community's work. Only in Congress, friends, only in Congress.

It's always struck me as funny that people get all worked up over the NIEs in the first place. As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the intelligence community will tell you, they are notoriously flawed. Remember the U.S.-Soviet "missile gap"? That was a bunch of nonsense cooked up in an NIE in 1958. The Iranian revolution of 1978? An NIE predicted it wouldn't happen. Then, of course, there's the now infamous NIE 2002-16HC, which made it sound as though Saddam Hussein was weeks away from having nukes.

NIEs are guesses, plain and simple. Just ask the Bush Administration. Even they agree that Ensign's plan is silly. "The President respects sixteen of the intelligence agencies got together to produce the National Intellligence Estimate. I don’t believe that there's any need to have an additional one," White House Spokeswoman Dana Perino told John Gizzi of the ultra-conservative rag Human Events.

Exactly. What is conveening a panel of politicians going to accomplish? The de-politization of the process? Um, right. I'm all for Congressional oversight. Too bad, for instance, that Ensign and his colleagues weren't equally worked up over the 2002 NIE on Iraq, or we might not be in the mess we're in now. But Ensign's plan to waste a bunch of Congress's time and money politicizing the latest NIE will accomplish nothing. I'm nominating this as the dumbest Congressional idea of 2007.

On his new blog, Stratfor's George Friedman endorses the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, and he has an unorthodox view of the Bush administration's motives for releasing it now:

We have always regarded the Iranian weapon program as a bargaining chip to be traded for concessions in Iraq. We repeated that ad nauseum I know, but we always thought it true. The NIE agrees with our view so we aren't going to take issue with it. We think it correct.

We also think there was a political component to it being announced. This was not the intelligence community sinking Bush's plans to attack Iran. The U.S. doesn't have the force to attack Iran, as we have argued in the past. Rather, it as [if] Bush [is] taking away [Iran's] bargaining chip. If Iran has no nuclear program, the U.S. doesn't have to make concessions to get rid of it. In an odd way, the NIE weakened the Iranian bargaining position.

This is too clever by half. The simple fact of the matter is that the case for punitive action against Tehran will be far harder to make now. And sure enough, the Chinese already appear to be taking their toe out of the water on a third round of U.N. sanctions. We may yet see a quiet turnaround in U.S. policy toward Iran, since, as Friedman says, the United States won't feel it needs to trade away the store in order to get a grand bargain. There is certainly the North Korea precedent. But that will be a second-best strategy. Somehow, I doubt that NSC staffers were high-fiving each other when the NIE hit the wires. That certainly seems to be what happened in Ahmadinejad's camp, though.

ALEX WONG/Getty Images News

The commentariat has, understandably, gone apoplectic about yesterday's news that Iran stopped its nuclear-weapons program in 2003. And several Democratic candidates, hoping to score points against frontrunner Hillary Clinton, are having a field day:

Barack Obama: "[T]he new National Intelligence Estimate makes a compelling case for less saber-rattling and more direct diplomacy."

John Edwards: "The new NIE finds that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that Iran can be dissuaded from pursuing a nuclear weapon through diplomacy."

The problem is, the NIE doesn't actually go that far. It strongly suggests that the threat of sanctions and military action is actually helpful, but makes no promises about what can be achieved through diplomacy:

Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international security and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways might—if perceived by Iran's leaders as credible—prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program.

The NIE's conclusion here is remarkably similar to National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley's statement, dismissed everywhere as pure spin:

The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically - without the use of force - as the Administration has been trying to do. And it suggests that the President has the right strategy: intensified international pressure along with a willingness to negotiate a solution that serves Iranian interests while ensuring that the world will never have to face a nuclear armed Iran. The bottom line is this: for that strategy to succeed, the international community has to turn up the pressure on Iran - with diplomatic isolation, United Nations sanctions, and with other financial pressure - and Iran has to decide it wants to negotiate a solution.

Matt Yglesias cries foul and says that the Bush administration has been hyping the threat, and that's certainly true. And it may well be that Vice President Dick Cheney discounts the intelligence community's assessment. But there may also be a defensible reason for the hysteria. If we take Hadley's statement at face value, the past year of bluster coming from the administration makes sense. The fundamental problem is that the Europeans, the Chinese, and especially the Russians are skittish about enacting U.N. sanctions. But the sanctions seem to be working! Yet to get others on board, the United States has had to sound the alarm about the program and threaten that if sanctions fail, it will turn to its Air Force for solutions. In order to be effective, this threat has to be credible: The Iranians have to believe it, and the other members of the Security Council have to believe it. In other words, the Bush administration has to convince the world that the alternative to sanctions is war, rather than a nuclear Iran that might be unpalatable but is ultimately a manageable problem.

Of course, what the administration hasn't done is offer Iran a credible package of inducements that includes security guarantees, economic incentives, and so forth. In the words of the NIE, "opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways." Hadley's mention of a "willingness to negotiate a solution that serves Iranian interests" hints that such a package might be in the offing. The trouble is, Iran's negotiators are much more irascible now than they were in 2003, so the price will be far higher than it was back then—assuming a deal is still even possible.

It's been rumored for a while that someone—perhaps U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney—had been holding up the publication of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program. And it's not hard to imagine why, given this explosive finding:

A new assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran was working inexorably toward building a bomb. [...]

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran's ultimate intentions about gaining a nuclear weapon remain unclear, but that Iran's "decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs."

"Some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige and goals for regional influence in other ways, might - if perceived by Iran's leaders as credible - prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program," the estimate states. [...]

The new estimate does say that Iran's ultimate goal is still to develop nuclear weapons. It concludes that if Iran were to end the freeze of its weapons program, it would still be at least two years before Tehran had enough highly enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb. But it says it is "very unlikely" that Iran could produce enough of the material by then.

Instead, the estimate concludes that it is more likely Iran could have a bomb by early to the middle of the next decade. The report says that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research judges that Iran is unlikely to achieve this goal before 2013 "because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems."

Remember, the State Department's intelligence shop was the group that had the honor of being least wrong about Iraq's WMD programs.

On Saturday, China indicated it was ready to play ball on U.N. sanctions. There's no word yet on how the Russians will vote. But if they get on board and the new Iran NIE is right—and I imagine it will be hotly debated—perhaps it will be possible to convince Iran to give up its goal of nuclear weapons through diplomacy after all. 

UPDATE: Download the pdf of the NIE report here.

Jeff Stein reports for CQ:

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn't last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI's criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails.

Posted without comment. Because really, what more is there to say?

UPDATE: Cyrus Farivar chimes in:

I'm not even close to having the skillz of an FBI agent, but I can tell you three reasons why this plan was doomed from the beginning — beyond than the fact that it’s totally illegal.

1) Falafel isn't a Persian food at all. When was the last time you saw an Iranian eating falafel? (And the one time I went with Boyk to Sunshine Café in Berkeley two weeks ago doesn't count.)

2) Iranian terrorist? Seriously? Think about that for a second. Name one Iranian terrorist. Go ahead, I dare you.

3) While the Bay Area may have some Iranians, we're dwarfed by the number that are in LA and Orange counties. Plus, everyone knows that real Iranians ("terrorists" or otherwise) hit up Mashti Malone's for totally sweet bastani.

Just a note, looking again at Stein's story above. He doesn't actually say that the FBI was specifically looking for purchases of falafel. It appears to be a poetic flourish by the reporter:

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

Of course, it's not as if it would be any more legitimate to look into purchases of joojeh sandwiches. Because if that were the case, half the working-day population of Dupont Circle and Georgetown would be in big trouble for going to Moby Dick's House of Kabob.

UPDATE2: Ryan Singel of Wired dubs this effort the "Total Falafel Awareness program".

Malcolm Nance, "a counter-terrorism and terrorism intelligence consultant for the U.S. government's Special Operations, Homeland Security and Intelligence agencies" and "an Arabic speaking interrogator and a master Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) instructor," says that waterboarding unquestionably is torture:

Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten[ed] with its use again and again.

This guy doesn't look like a wuss to me. Over to you, Mukasey.

(Hat tip: American Footprints)

AELX WONG/Getty Images News

Famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who has a new piece in the New Yorker, had some very interesting things to say in an interview with Der Spiegel last week. Topics ranged from Hitler to the First Amendment in the United States, but his most interesting comments were on Iran and Iraq. On how much the West knows about Iran's nuclear program:

A lot. And it's been underestimated how much the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) knows. If you follow what (IAEA head Mohamed) ElBaradei and the various reports have been saying, the Iranians have claimed to be enriching uranium to higher than a 4 percent purity, which is the amount you need to run a peaceful nuclear reactor. But the IAEA's best guess is that they are at 3.67 percent or something. The Iranians are not even doing what they claim to be doing. The IAEA has been saying all along that they've been making progress but basically, Iran is nowhere.

On Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's status inside Iran:

The reality is, he's not nearly as powerful inside the country as we like to think he is. The Revolutionary Guards have direct control over the missile program and if there is a weapons program, they would be the ones running it. Not Ahmadinejad.

On the "surge" in Iraq:

The Surge means basically that, in some way, the president has accepted ethnic cleansing, whether he's talking about it or not. When he first announced the Surge in January, he described it as a way to bring the parties together. He's not saying that any more. I think he now understands that ethnic cleansing is what is going to happen.

Unlike a lot of journalists, Hersh will publicly state what's he thinking, even if it shows political bias. What he said might not be that surprising, but it's telling because it provides an indication of what some journalist think about what's going on in the Middle East. It should be noted, however, that Hersh himself has admitted to fudging the truth a bit. So take what he says with a large grain of salt. 

For today's Seven Questions, FP chatted with Ambassador John Bolton, former top Bush administration official and current senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Bolton's got a new book out, Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations. This statement from Bolton ought to hook you in:

Once upon a time, we knew how to do clandestine regime change. We need to reacquire that capability.

Check it out.

David Silverman/Getty Images News

A number of reports out of Asia today add precious little clarity to what is becoming a growing international story: Israel's alleged bombing on September 6 of nuclear materials of North Korean origin in Syria. First, South Korean and Japanese officials mysteriously said that the next round six-party talks to end North Korea's nuclear program, which had been scheduled for September 19, are being delayed. Japanese officials told the Associated Press they did not know why Pyongyang delayed the talks. However, AFP reported that South Korean officials said the talks were pushed back because the Chinese had yet to deliver 50,000 tons of fuel, as they agreed to do in February. An unidentified South Korean foreign ministry official said:

It appears the North's refusal is a simple protest against something it is not happy with, rather than to squeeze more out of the others.

News of the delay was unexpected, given Kim Jong Il's recent cooperative moves. It's also suspicious, as the most likely reasons for a delay would seem to be related to the charge North Korea was providing nuclear assistance to Syria. That connection was disputed by Joseph Cirincione here, but the story continues to gain traction in the British press, with detailed new reports over the weekend alleging the North Korea-Syria axis. On Saturday, U.S. nuclear negotiator Chris Hill didn't directly address the allegations, but told reporters the plan in any case was to press ahead with the six-party talks. On Sunday, U.S. Defense Secretary Gates neither denied nor confirmed the allegations, but said that the U.S. was watching both North Korea and Syria closely.

Then on Monday morning, Seoul's foreign minister dismissed any nuclear connection between North Korea and Syria. Granted, this could be an effort by the South Koreans to salvage the talks the progress made in the last year, and the upcoming summit between the two Koreas. But given the sensational quality of the reports—clandestine air strikes, dumped fuel tanks on the Turkish border, secret nuclear caches and such—this story is not likely to disappear.

Something didn't smell quite right in Glenn Kessler's recent story in the Washington Post about a possible nuclear link between North Korea and Syria. It looked to me like déjà vu all over again. So I asked Joseph Cirincione, senior fellow and director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, and a frequent FP contributor, to weigh in. Here's his take:

This story is nonsense. The Washington Post story should have been headlined "White House Officials Try to Push North Korea-Syria Connection." This is a political story, not a threat story. The mainstream media seems to have learned nothing from the run-up to war in Iraq. It is a sad commentary on how selective leaks from administration officials who have repeatedly misled the press are still treated as if they were absolute truth.

Once again, this appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted "intelligence" to key reporters in order to promote a preexisting political agenda. If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria.

Few reporters appear to have done even basic investigation of the miniscule Syrian nuclear program (though this seems to be filtering into some stories running Friday). There is a reason that Syria is not included in most proliferation studies, including mine: It doesn't amount to much. Begun almost 40 years ago, the Syrian program is a rudimentary research program built around a tiny 30-kilowatt research reactor that produces isotopes and neutrons. It is nowhere near a program for nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel. Over a dozen countries have aided the program including Belgium, Germany, Russia, China, and the United States (where several Syrian scientists trained) as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). If North Korea gave them anything short of nuclear weapons it is of little consequence. Syria does not have the financial, technical or industrial base to develop a serious nuclear program anytime in the foreseeable future.

Nor is there anything new about Syria being on the U.S. "watch list"; it has been for years. Unfortunately, this misleading story will now enter the lexicon of the far right. For months we will hear pundits citing the "Syrian-Iranian-Korean nuclear axis" and complaining that attempts to negotiate an end to North Korea's program are bound fail in the face of such duplicity, etc., etc.

The real story is how quickly the New York Times and the Washington Post snapped up the bait and ran exactly the story the officials wanted, thereby feeding a mini-media frenzy. It appears that nothing, not even a disastrous and unnecessary war, can break this Pavlovian response to an "intelligence scoop."

For information on the Syrian nuclear program that any reporter should have read, see the Web site of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

UPDATE: Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Glenn Kessler responds via e-mail:

I think the world of Joe Cirincione. So I obviously take his concerns seriously.

All I can say in response is that I (and a number of uncredited colleagues) spent more than week knocking on doors of many agencies, seeking answers. No one tried to wave us off the story, including people who normally I thought would have tried their best to prevent us from printing it. I did note a number of caveats and explained that Syria never had much of a nuclear program. There appears to be a connection to the Israeli raid, which is now the subject of some of the tightest censorship in years. We will keep pursuing the story in hopes of providing greater clarity for our readers--and especially experts like Joe.

... more here from Kessler, who reports that the State Department's Chris Hill doesn't expect negotiations with North Korea to be derailed by this.

The BBC reports that Wikipedia Scanner, a tool that can identify the source of edits to Wikipedia pages, revealed that workers from CIA computers have altered a number of Wikipedia entries. So what insightful additions did the Agency allegedly contribute?

On the profile of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the tool indicates that a worker on the CIA network reportedly added the exclamation "Wahhhhhh!" before a section on the leader's plans for his presidency.

A warning on the profile of the anonymous editor reads: "You have recently vandalised a Wikipedia article, and you are now being asked to stop this type of behaviour."

The entries for Porter Goss, former CIA director, and Oprah Winfrey were also apparently edited by the CIA network user, though these changes were "more innocuous."

JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP

Russia's moves on missile defense and its decision to back out of a key arms control treaty are understandably gobbling up most of the news space devoted to Eastern Europe. But keep an eye on relations between Poland and Belarus, which claims to have busted up a Polish spy ring:

Belarus says it has smashed a spy ring which was passing information to Poland about a joint Belarussian-Russian air defence system, called the S-300. The head of the Belarus KGB security service, Dmitry Vegera, said four former Belarussian army officers and a Russian officer had been arrested.

The missile shield has clearly exacerbated relations between the two countries, but there are a host of other nettlesome issues. For months now, Poland has been broadcasting news into heavily-censored Belarus and accepting students who have been kicked out of Belarus's universities for political reasons. In their attacks on the thuggish and unpredictable Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko, Poles frequently invoke their own legacy of Solidarity. Why does this matter, you ask? Because Poland is a member of NATO, more serious unpleasantness between the neighbors could quickly become another crisis between Russia and the West. And then things would really get interesting.

According to an article in today's LA Times, Mexico is expanding its domestic surveillance program with a little help from its northern neighbors. The country's Federal Investigative Agency is installing a new $3 million Communications Intercept System which will make it easier to tap phones, track the location of cell phone callers, recognize voices on the other side, and read e-mails. Mexican President Felipe Calderon says that the expanded surveillance is necessary to combat drug gangs, which have killed hundreds of people in the past few months.

What Calderon fails to mention is that the contract shows that the new system is being paid for by the U.S. State Department, and that the U.S. government may have access to some of the information gleaned from this intensified surveillance. Isn't it nice to know that neighbors can share?