The Sunday morning talk shows were dominated by two intelligence-based stories this weekend: the CIA tapes and their destruction, and the NIE’s take on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. On Fox News Sunday, Bill Kristol gave one theory of the CIA’s reasoning for destroying the tapes, and the mainstream media’s overreaction to the story.
“These tapes were destroyed at the direction of the Director of Clandestine Operations at the CIA: a 24 year CIA veteran praised on his retirement earlier this year by the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The idea, Ted Kennedy, the idea that this is like Watergate, that it’s politically motivated is on its face ludicrous. Ted Kennedy should be ashamed of himself–I don’t know if that’s possible. Look, we don’t know what’s on those tapes. These tapes apparently were destroyed shortly after the existence of the secret prisons abroad was leaked. Obviously, people in the CIA were very concerned about leaks. There could be very sensitive information on these tapes. Zubaydah may have given up the names of people who we then turned, we bugged, we eavesdropped on. That could have been the real fear: That really important American intelligence assets would be revealed if these tapes or transcripts of these tapes were leaked. … I think it was probably prudent to have destroyed them. Nothing could have been gained by keeping them around.”
On This Week, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was on to talk about the National Intelligence Estimate and assessment of Iran’s nuclear programs. Gingrich bemoaned the politicized nature of the report and offered a reason for the sudden about face on Iranian capabilities:
“What you have is a release which, first of all, could not have been written to be more damaging to the Bush administration than it was. And the three people who wrote it are all three former State Department employees … they’re all three people who dislike what Bush is doing. I think they deliberately undermined the administration. I think this is the equivalent of a coup d’etat by the bureaucracy. If you actually read what they said … even the unclassified version doesn’t say what the front, what the headline said. The unclassified version says that there’s a big civilian program, they have at least 3,000 centrifuges already working–and 3,000’s enough to produce one bomb a year. They have a clear commitment to get nuclear weapons; there’s no evidence they’re going to give up that commitment. What the report technically said was that there was one particular program that was secret that we were certain was ongoing, we’ve now had a defector, that’s my guess, and the defector’s told them this, and my question is: How do we know that defector’s not a plant?”
Rudy Giuliani used his time on Meet the Press Sunday morning to emphasize that progress wouldn’t have been made on the Iraninan front if the military option had been left off the table, and pointed out that something pretty specific happened in 2003 that coincided with Iran’s shifting nuclear status:
“And of course we don’t, we don’t want to use the military option. It would be dangerous; it would be risky. But I think it would be more dangerous and more risky if Iran did become a nuclear power. We should utilize sanctions. We should utilize as much pressure as we’re capable of. But the fact that that is there, that military option is there, not taken off the table ultimately increases the pressure, doesn’t it? The reality is the pressure works. They said that, too, right? They, they said in 2003 Iran abandoned its nuclear program, they believe, because of all the pressure, all the threats, that they are susceptible to that. 2003 was the year in which we deposed Saddam Hussein. It was the year in which America showed massive military strength.”
