2. After yesterday saying NATO is a threat to Russia while ordering French amphibious attack ships, Russia's defense chief says that the planned US missile shield for its European allies is "aimed at Russia," not Iran.

3. Inexpicably and knowingly late, Lebanese President Seuliman asked Spain's president to ensure UNIFIL forces enforce UN Resolution 1701 to prevent Hizballah from re-arming via Iran, Syria. That mission has already failed, with Hizballah more armed than before 2006 war.

4. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (via Yemen) issued audio call to jihad against "Crusaders (Christians) and Jews," seeks to attack and close Red Sea to US naval traffic "supplying the Jews."

Upstaging Osama Bin Laden as the most dangerous man in the world may be an American recruiter for al-Qaida: Anwar Awlaki. So why's he talking to Al-Jazeera instead of interrogators? (Emphasis added.)

Any other questions?

You can read the rest if you like. You should actually.

But please, let me know when you can answer the first question.

Because I got nuttin'.

5. As France finalizes deal to sell Russia helicopter carrier warships, President Dmitri Medvedev declares NATO "Russia's greatest threat" and welcomes leaders of the Palestinian terrorist group HAMAS to the Kremlin.

RUSSIA
Russian President Medvedev declares NATO to be Russia's 'Greatest Threat' - The News (Poland)
France Agrees to Helo Carrier Warship Sale to Russia - Reuters
OpEd: No reset, no restart -- no deal with Moscow - Washington Times
Hamas' Top Leader Visits Moscow - New York Times

That French deal looks smarter by the day.

And note Russia welcoming Hamas' senior leadership to Moscow today. Just for amusement, the observant might also note that Iran's Supreme Leader welcomed the top leadership of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Tehran today as well.

PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES
Iran Supreme Leader Meets Palestinian PIJ Terror Leaders: Praises, Predicts Fall of Israel - Tehran Times (Regime-run)

Surely there is an amply nuanced rationale explaining away the friends of friends and enemies of enemies appearance. Surely.

Nuance is overrated. Believe what you see.

2. Afghan President Karzai states he wants US transition to Afghan forces to begin by end of year. Afghan forces incapable, demonstrated by arrest of senior police official for role in roadside bombs.

3. SecState Clinton claims Obama administration Iran, Korea stances yielding "benefits." Curiously, Yonhap News reports Germany told South Korea to perpare for earlier than expected reunification with North.

4. In mere formality, Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab (The Youth) officially aligned with al-Qaeda. Group's leadership had deep AQ ties even before formation.

5. As France finalizes deal to sell Russia helicopter carrier warships, President Dmitri Medvedev declares NATO "Russia's greatest threat" and welcomes leaders of the Palestinian terrorist group HAMAS to the Kremlin.

The most recent incident has Somali pirates attacking a Cambodian cargo ship. At this writing, there are few details on what happened.

So it seems that very little has changed since last April 29th when Firewatch had the chance to interview Jim Jorrie, president of ESPADA Logistics and Security. Actually, it seems that a great deal has changed since then. ESPADA has expanded its capabilities by acquiring five additional armed, fast-patrol vessels for use in the Gulf of Aden.

As Jorrie told local San Antonio television station KSAT-12 some of the basics of his company's work. With al Qaeda trumpteting its involvement in Yemen based terrorism, as things heat up in the Horn of Africa region, it is companies like this one that are on the line. This disconnect, if there is one, is that ESPADA is based in San Antonio. Then again, the historic military presence in the city makes almost anything possible.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Jim Jorrie and I are friends and we operate in similar circles.

"Just as important as closing the prison quickly is closing it right, and that means putting an end to the illegal policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial," said the ACLU's executive director, Anthony Romero.

There will likely be more to this story as time progresses. For now, maybe this will lead to a reconsideration of holding the trials for the September 11th mass murderers in Manhattan.

U.S. intelligence agencies are quietly revising their widely disputed assertion that Iran has no active program to design or build a nuclear bomb. Three U.S. and two foreign counterproliferation officials tell NEWSWEEK that, as soon as next month, the intel agencies are expected to complete an "update" to their controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Tehran "halted its nuclear weapons program" in 2003 and "had not restarted" it as of mid-2007. The officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive information, say the revised report will bring U.S. intel agencies more in line with other countries' spy agencies (such as Britain's MI6, Germany's BND, and Israel's Mossad), which have maintained that Iran has been pursuing a nuclear weapon.

What the November 2007 Iran NIE (PDF) said was the following (and unsubstantiated anywhere beyond the initial report paragraph).

A. We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran's announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran's previously undeclared nuclear work.

The principal authors - Department of National Intelligence employees previously transfered from the State Department - made point that Iran actually had a weapons program, but only in the false context that it had halted it in 2003. They were making political hay and, at the time, trying to derail what they perceived as a possible Bush attack inside and on Iran. That this perception was itself also patently false is of no consequence. What was written is what was written, and it armed Iran's Russian and Chinese allies to undercut any diplomatic efforts - diplomatic efforts - through the UN and the UN Security Council.

Why do I say the NIE will be "begrudgingly" revised? Pay attention to the last sentence from Mark Hosenball at Newsweek.

Yet two of the U.S. sources caution the new assessment will likely be "Talmudic" in its parsing. They say U.S. analysts now believe that Iran may well have resumed "research" on nuclear weapons--theoretical work on how to design and construct a bomb--but that Tehran is not engaged in "development"--actually trying to build a weapon. "The intelligence community is always reluctant to make a total retreat because it makes them look bad," says the third American.

Well, that's just too bad. It's not about who's right, but about what's right. Get that backwards and you are incapable of adjusting and playing a game of career defense instead of intelligence offense. This is pervasive throughout the intelligence community (and others, mind you) and leads to intelligence failures and the compounding of errors for the sake of some fool's efforts to cover a turd in the sand.

If you're not man enough to admit when you got it wrong, you're not man enough for intelligence. The end.

Just hours after the public version of the 2007 NIE on Iran was released, John Batchelor and I spoke about it on his radio program - and its intended and unintended consequences.

You'll see, regarding the handcuffing of sanctions, that this analysis was spot on. And the after-effects remain. To wit, China still balking on Iran sanctions.

Important archives regarding the 2007 Iran NIE are referenced in today's DailyBriefing. And, at risk of seeming like I am tooting my own horn, the news today of its revision is a passive admission by its authors that I was spot on in my criticism and analysis. Some archives reproduced below.

BACKTRACKING A VERY BAD IRAN INTEL ESTIMATE
Coming Around On Iran: Bad 2007 NIE Now To Be 'Revised' - Newsweek
Explaining Why 2007 NIE Was So Bad: NIE: Cutting of your nose to... - NRO (2007)
Lingering Bad NIE Effects: A Manufactured Debate - Is Iran Designing Warheads? - ThreatsWatch (2009)
China balks at Iran sanctions - CS Monitor
Schippert Interview: The China-Russia-Iran Axis - FrontPage Magazine (2008)

In a December 2007 RapidRecon entry, I asked the following very straight-forward question which still remains.

"[A]sk yourself why Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was in North Korea to watch every rogue state's weapons farm team hold an intramural scrimmage with their first nuclear bomb test detonation."

Crickets from the 2007 NIE authors at the time and since. Now, perhaps, they are forced to get it right, even though they are loathe and unlikely to overtly admit being dead wrong. We are not. They were wrong and we were right. Save face if you must, but let's just start getting it right.

UPDATE: I overlooked a simple yet critical part of the 2007 NIE for ThreatsWatch readers: the NIE's politically motivated authors. From Sweetness & Light, meet the three primary authors of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran: "[H]yper-partisan anti-Bush officials" Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

2. A Greek tanker has been released by Somali pirates after a record ransom as paid by ship's owners. Reward begets more piracy. Meanwhile, Somali government troops and African Union troops were surprisingly reported involved in a deadly clash, blue on blue, in Mogadishu.

3. Iraq's "Chemical Ali," a colonel in Saddam's army, will be hanged for the murderous 1988 nerve gas attacks on Kurdish villages in Iraq's north.

4. One of the only truly offensive approaches to terrorism - the CIA's aerial drone attacks on al-Qaeda in Pakistan - are coming under fire from within the United States via the ACLU. The group has filed FOIA requests challenging the legal status of such operations.

In a Washington Post article, Terrorism as Virus, the War Against Islamist Militancy was actually described by drawing parallels between terrorism and a mutating virus or metastasizing cancer. Indeed, the realization that the threat of al Qaeda spawned global terrorism was not a conventional one, and was one that lacked a singular identity, structure or geographic center led to the observation of it being more like a social contagion. The authors posed that dealing with the global spread of Islamic Militancy with similar context as the World deals with the spread of the H1N1 virus or the fear of a Global Pandemic would lead to asking similar questions.

1. What is the nature of the ideology, how does it spread and what population segment(s) are most vulnerable?

2. What are the dynamics that cause it to spread?

3. What is the long-term approach to stemming its spread?

Whether you, the reader or my colleagues, find this view dissonant in any way, the fact is that the jihad against the West is spreading "like a virus."

Still another report published six years ago, the Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project spoke to a number of factors that predicted the future spread and emergence of Islamic Militancy. Among those observations was this:

The key factors that spawned international terrorism show no signs of abating over the next 15 years. Facilitated by global communications, the revival of Muslim identity will create a framework for the spread of radical Islamic ideology inside and outside the Middle East, including Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Western Europe, where religious identity has traditionally not been as strong. This revival has been accompanied by a deepening solidarity among Muslims caught up in national or regional separatist struggles, such as Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq, Kashmir, Mindanao, and southern Thailand, and has emerged in response to government repression, corruption, and ineffectiveness. Informal networks of charitable foundations, madrassas, hawalas1, and other mechanisms will continue to proliferate and be exploited by radical elements; alienation among unemployed youths will swell the ranks of those vulnerable to terrorist recruitment.

It went on to project that in the years ahead, al Qaeda could be superseded by other, similar, extremist groups with greater decentralization.

So out of the "global struggle against violent extremism" came the DoD FY 2010 Budget Request Summary Justification clearly referred to what had been the Global War on Terrorism as the "Overseas Contingency Operation."

In August 2009, John Brennan the President's Assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and presented A New Approach to Safeguarding America Admittedly, some of the elements outlined in this speech make sense, especially those that target economic development in areas of the world that are subject to violence and extremist tendencies. But the predicate principle of the speech was this:

Today--as the President's principal advisor on counterterrorism--I want to outline the President's efforts to safeguard the American people from the transnational challenge that poses one of the greatest threats to our national security--the scourge of violent extremists who would use terrorism to slaughter Americans abroad and at home.

Mr. Brennan went on and stated the assessment of al Qaeda:

Al Qaeda and its affiliates are under tremendous pressure. After years of U.S. counterterrorism operations, and in partnership with other nations, al Qaeda has been seriously damaged and forced to replace many of its top-tier leadership with less experienced and less capable individuals. It is being forced to work harder and harder to raise money, to move its operatives around the world, and to plan attacks.

And the focus of this policy was to push the Taliban out of their lairs in Afghanistan to prevent the return of al Qaeda. He also said that casting the "conflict" as a "global war" played into the "warped narrative" of al Qaeda and that it reinforced al Qaeda's view that it was a global entity. Struck from the Presidential vernacular also was the word "jihad" and thus emerges the concept of an "Overseas Contingency Operation" to fight violent extremists.

Not calling it what it is can be a misleading and potentially damaging. Attempting to separate al Qaeda from the Taliban, or posing that the Pakistani group, Lashkar e-Taiba is an unaligned with al Qaeda as was stated by Daniel Benjamin, Coordinator of the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism in an address at the CATO Institute seems to ignore the existence of al Qaeda or al Qaeda clones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Algeria (and North Africa), infiltrations in Europe and in Southeast Asia. Again, while debated, the al-Suri approach of a decentralized model of self-sustaining and autonomous cells driven by a common ideology behind the al Qaeda jihad is difficult to deny. In fact there is some evidence and belief that al Qaeda has cells in or influences groups in as many as 60 countries. And this discounts the likely existence of "sleeper cells."

It is hard to see this global battle against Islamic extremism as anything but a Global War on Terrorism. No matter what you call it, terrorism is spreading, as they wrote in August 2005, like a virus.

2. Just after the students unions at the London School of Economics and at London University "twinned" with the Islamic University in Gaza as a show of political support, it is revealed that a key professor at one of the universities has ties to the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

3. Somali pirate attacks also continue unabated. Ransom of millions has been paid to free a Greek tanker. The amount is reportedly the most ever given, continuing an upward trend for the pirates' reward.

4. Mexican authorities have captured a top cartel boss implicated in the killing of at least 300.

If for no other reason than as a placeholder and a reference, Federal Register.

237 items listed.

The audio of our discussion is below.

Many thanks to Crane Durham and the American Family Radio Network for lending their airtime and allowing us to communicate with their over 2 million listeners.

It was an honor to have guest hosted for Crane for several days in December. I'm looking forward to the next opportunity. Hosting a national radio show is a strange mix of an easy and natural-feeling blast, yet exhausting. Once that mic goes cold, you need either a power nap or half a gallon of orange juice and coffee. (I've never tried the power nap approach, so I'm assuming that would do the trick.)

The top official in charge of analyzing terror threats did not cut short his ski vacation after the underwear bomber nearly blew up an airliner on Christmas Day ... Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center since 2007, decided not to return to his agency's "bat cave" nerve center in McLean, Va., until several days after Christmas, two U.S. officials said.

Granted, its the information age and working remotely is a reality for a lot of people; I just don't think the head of NCTC is one of those people.

At the risk of casting an unwarranted aspersion, it used to be that you'd cancel evening or weekend plans if you even thought that something was going to happen, and you purposefully left gaps in the calendar during periods when you knew things could get hairy (such as major holidays). Being an intelligence officer means making sacrifices. That doesn't mean you can't have a life, but it also means you lead a life interrupted for as long as you answer the call.

2. US officials began to 'connect the dots' on Christmas Flight 253 bomber while flight was in the air. Administration's National Security Adviser Gen. Jones says report on failures will "shock" Americans.

3. A Western intelligence report was issued to Arab Gulf states warning them of al-Qaeda plans to attack.

4. Israel is nearing readiness to deploy its Iron Dome short range missile and rocket defense shield. IDF warns Israelis to not expect perfection, but enhanced defense. Meanwhile, a mortar barrage on Israel was launched again from Gaza.

5. Washington intends to restart a Middle East peace process in the coming months, insisting that it pick up where it left off in December 2008.

2. China is now saying that the time is not right for harsher sanctions on Iran. The veto-wielding UN Security Council member arrives just in time, again, to quash efforts. China also delivered a rush order to Iran for armored riot control trucks with water cannons and plow blades to help put down Iranian protesters

3. The Afghanistan government has asked the UN to ease some sanctions on the Taliban. Seeks to ease restrictions on Taliban members who "renounce violence and agree to support the government."

4. In Pakistan, a US drone strike in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas targeted al-Qaeda and Taliban elements. Meanwhile, to the north in the disputed Kashmir territory, a suicide bomber killed three Pakistani soldiers. An attempt to escalate tensions between India and Pakistan? Possible.