Whom to Believe? al Qaeda Situation "Grim" NSA, or "Near Defeat" CIA

Whom to Believe? al Qaeda Situation "Grim" NSA, or "Near Defeat" CIA

www.washingtonpost.com

First Article, May 30: Al Qaeda is essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the world, CIA Director Michael Hayden said in a Washington Post interview published on Friday.

The upbeat assessment came less than a year after the CIA warned of new threats from a resurgent al Qaeda.

Second Article, today: A regenerated al-Qaeda will remain the leading terrorism threat, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Donald M. Kerr said. Pakistan's "inward" political focus and failure to control the tribal territories where al-Qaeda maintains a haven, he said, is "the number one thing we worry about."

Kerr's analysis, in a speech Thursday evening that he posited as a presidential intelligence briefing delivered on Jan. 21, 2009, contrasted with more optimistic administration forecasts of rapprochement among Iraq's political forces and a possible Middle East peace agreement in the next eight months. It also seemed at odds with CIA Director Michael V. Hayden's judgment that al-Qaeda is now on the defensive throughout the world, including along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

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[edit on 31-5-2008 by gottago]

The US's national security agencies are having a rare, very public argument over the threat assessments each gives to al Qaeda, right on the front pages of the Washington Post, the nation's political newspaper of record.

Yesterday, in an article in the WaPo entitled Al Qaeda near defeat, on defensive: CIA chief, the Director of the CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden, stated that al Qaeda was in disarray in Iraq and around the world.

This morning, the WaPo reports that the Deputy Director of the NSA, Donald Kerr, said that al Qaeda remains the 'number one threat we worry about" and characterized the situation as a stalemate with no progress.

Whom to believe, and what is the motivation for each agency to offer such widely divergent views on the al Qaeda threat? And why was there no coordination to present a unified party line on this testimony by the Administration and avoid the embarrassment of a public squabble on such an important national security issue?

I believe the dissonance should be viewed as a proxy fight over Iran.

The CIA purposely released an embarrassing 1974 NIE (link above) while Bush was on the first of his recent trips to Israel that stated that Israel had nukes and was proliferating nuclear technologies to other friendly states; now this rosy assessment of al Qaeda.

The NSA, on the other hand, is taking the hardline.

The internal debate on Iran in the national security apparat is spilling out in the open, and is being played using the beard of al Qaeda.





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[grammar]

[edit on 31-5-2008 by gottago]