{"id":489,"date":"2007-12-04T14:20:04","date_gmt":"2007-12-04T18:20:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2007\/12\/04\/latest-national-intelligence-estimat"},"modified":"2007-12-04T20:25:06","modified_gmt":"2007-12-05T00:25:06","slug":"latest-national-intelligence-estimate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2007\/12\/04\/latest-national-intelligence-estimate\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest National Intelligence Estimate: Oops! Iran&#8217;s Nukeless!  *"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The wires are glad to tell you what they think it says, but won&#8217;t give you a link. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dni.gov\/press_releases\/20071203_release.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">I respect my readers<sup>1<\/sup> more than that<\/a>.  It is not that long. First of all, only the summary &#8211; i.e. the conclusions &#8211; is declassified. The &#8220;evidence&#8221; is all carefully sequestered within <strong>the cone of silence<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>p1. Full color title with <strong>the seal of the Director of National Intelligence &#8211;<\/strong> wherein the eagle soars on gold wings while wearing a stars and stripes breast plate.<\/li>\n<li>p2. Dramatis personae.<\/li>\n<li>p3. The NIE Process.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These things don&#8217;t usually change from one NIE to another.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> p4. Scope Note &#8211; <strong>They tell us what they&#8217;re going to tell us<\/strong>. Unique to the NIE<\/li>\n<li>p5. Explanation of Estimative Language &#8211; boilerplate glossary of the official terms of obfuscation.<sup>2<\/sup><\/li>\n<li>p6-8.Key Judgments. Hooray! <strong>They tell us<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>p9. Key differences &#8230; <strong>They tell us what they told us<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This NIE raises as many questions as it answers.<sup>3<\/sup> I&#8217;d like to go into them with y&#8217;all<sup>1<\/sup>, but I have to go do some life support activity. Y&#8217;all<sup>1<\/sup> come back now, hear?<\/p>\n<p><sup>1<\/sup> I&#8217;m assuming there&#8217;s <strong>someone<\/strong> besides Tim Gray who reads &#8220;the guy by the door.&#8221; Wait, someone besides Tim and Joe Wrinn \ud83d\ude42 . Actually Joe has <strong>person<\/strong> who reads it. I read her blog too.<br \/>\n<sup><\/sup><\/p>\n<p><sup>2<\/sup>They attempt to define a seven category scale of likehood and a three category scale of confidence. The categories necessarily have some width. There is also fuzziness about the boundaries. The serious question &#8211; does the fog of the language explaning the fuzziness of the boundaries clarify anything? Maybe it&#8217;s a good thing <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Chomsky\" target=\"_blank\">Noam<\/a> reads these things. Confidence is about the quality of the sources used in the estimate all of which are carefully sequestered in <strong>the cone of silence<\/strong>. Hey trust us! Been there! Done that!<br \/>\n<sup><\/sup><\/p>\n<p><sup>3<\/sup>It&#8217;s OK. I didn&#8217;t take expos at Harvard.<\/p>\n<p>* It would be more in keeping with the spirit of the N.I.E.&#8217;s <strong>explanation of estimative language <\/strong>to say:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We estimate with a moderate to high level of confidence that we may have made, with a significant probability, a misapprehension of the Iranian situation vis. a vis. nuclear weapons, but it was with a very high probability an honest misapprehension which we can with the highest of confidence assert that it is exceedingly unlikely that we have done it this time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Work with me people. I&#8217;m up against Drudge!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The wires are glad to tell you what they think it says, but won&#8217;t give you a link. I respect my readers1 more than that. It is not that long. First of all, only the summary &#8211; i.e. the conclusions &#8211; is declassified. The &#8220;evidence&#8221; is all carefully sequestered within the cone of silence. p1. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":168,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[776],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sand-oil-and-tears"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/168"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}