This is a very, very big deal.
Why the media is not really picking up on this in any significant way tells you of the trouble we have in the US, they really do believe it’s their job to protect this president.
This document is not an intelligence assessment. An intelligence assessment would, for one thing, acknowledge up front the differences in how the same facts have been interpreted, from one annual assessment to the next. It would, for another thing, take into account all the significant facts from a reporting period, rather than leaving big ones out.
But it would also refrain from being in the tank for a radical regime that’s running around the Middle East distributing arms, deploying paramilitary troops, and alarming our own allies: Arab, Israeli, and Turkish.
Magic wand: U.S. intel egregiously whitewashes Iran in latest threat assessment
Times of Israel picked up today on the fact that the latest Worldwide Threat Assessment from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, has effectively de-listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism. It has eliminated references to Hezbollah as a terrorist group as well.
And ToI‘s finding is clearly accurate, as a perusal of the 2015, 2014, and 2013 Worldwide Threat Assessments confirms.
But it’s worse than that. The 2015 Worldwide Threat Assessment soft-soaps the Iranian threat quite astoundingly, not just in terms of whether Iran is formally presented as a terrorism threat, but in terms of characterizing Iran’s activities overall. A convincing case can be made that this is not “intelligence” being provided here. It’s political, even propagandistic, narrative-writing.
Elder of Ziyon has laid out some of this, comparing the verbiage from the assessments in 2012-14 with the ZERO that is said about Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism or Hezbollah as a terrorist actor in the 2015 assessment. His juxtaposition of the 2014 and 2015 passages is telling (emphasis in original):
Iran and Hizballah [sic]
Outside of the Syrian theater, Iran and Lebanese Hizballah continue to directly threaten the interests of US allies. Hizballah has increased its global terrorist activity in recent years to a level that we have not seen since the 1990s.
2015:
(Nothing.)
Elder points out further the Iranian-sponsored attacks abroad that aren’t mentioned in these assessments, which is an important point in and of itself.
There’s more to say, however. To get at the sheer scope of what’s being done in this cornerstone U.S. intelligence assessment, we need to enlarge our view just a little bit in the 2014-vs.-2015 comparison.
The first point to make is that even in 2014, there was a subtle downgrading of the terrorism emphasis with regard to Iran. That even extended to Hezbollah, although Hezbollah was still mentioned (briefly) as a perpetrator of terrorism. Iran actually was not listed as a sponsor, in the 2014 assessment.
The passage Elder quoted from the 2014 assessment did come under the “Terrorism” heading. But the wording acknowledged only that “Iran…continue[s] to directly threaten the interests of U.S. allies.” In the passage in question, only Hezbollah is cited explicitly as being connected to terrorism.
That may seem like a minor point, but it functions as a stepping stone to the 2015 assessment, in which mention of Iran under the Terrorism heading is eliminated entirely.
