The father of the Pakistani bomb says that helping the CIA fight the Russians in Afghanistan gave his country "the space" it needed to develop nuclear weapons.

"We were allying with the United States in the Afghan war. The aid was coming," nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan said in an Aug. 31 Pakistan television interview, an English translation of which surfaced Tuesday.

"I maintain that the war had provided us with space to enhance our nuclear capability," Khan  added.

"The credit goes to me and my team, because it was a very difficult task, which was next to impossible. But given the US and European pressure on our program, it is true that had the Afghan war not taken place at that time, we would not have been able to make the bomb as early as we did," Khan said.

In nothing else, Chas W. Freeman's surprise surrender Tuesday shows that when it comes to U.S. national security policy, the Arabs will never trump Israel in Washington, no matter how many think tanks they fund, law firms they hire and former American diplomats they buy.

Once Freeman's name surfaced as the Obama administration's choice to head the National Intelligence Council, he was as doomed as an Afghan villager in the cross hairs of a Predator drone.

Word hasn't leaked yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if President-elect Barack Obama has already figured out that when he wants quick answers to what's going on in the world, the last person to ask is the head of U.S. intelligence.

The steady deterioration of personnel and standards of intelligence analysis, especially at the CIA, has been going on for decades, a number of former top intelligence officials I know say.

The tip of the rot surfaces from time to time, such as with the 9/11 surprise and the gimcrackery reports on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The dogs howl and the caravan moves on. Nothing changes, many well placed former intelligence officials have been telling me.  But the current, possibly fatal dangers we face demand the problems be fixed.

We've been spending too much time chattering about the operations side of intelligence lately, they say, in particular whether Leon Panetta, the former OMB head and chief of staff to President Clinton, is up to handling the spies and back-alley guys and gals.

But officials have been reminding me that it was the dismally poor analysis of intelligence that enabled President Bush to lead the nation into the disastrous invasion of Iraq -- not faulty espionage (such as it was).   

And it's the analysis served up by the CIA and other spy agencies, they point out, that will guide President Obama's decisions on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea, among other front-burner emergencies.

And that, say many rueful former officials, is where the agencies need a severe spanking.

Can Obama do it where so many of his predecessors have failed? One can only hope that the erstwhile professor, forged by the Socratic methods of his Harvard Law School instructors, will lay the lumber on his intelligence chiefs and briefers, asking them harder questions than they're used to.

Such as, "How do you know that?" 

Now, this is a staple of a good newsroom. It's a question editors ask reporters, and good reporters ask sources, all the time. I like to think that an old-fashioned city editor would have laughed the pre-war intelligence on Iraq out of their newsrooms.

But the melancholy truth, according to my well placed sources, is that even after the  intelligence disasters of 9/11 and Iraq, President Obama has a better chance of getting up-to-the-minute information on, say, Hamas, from newspapers than he does the PDB - the President's Daily Brief - served up by the Directorate of National Intelligence and CIA.

"So," I asked a former intelligence agency head over seafood this week, "if I'm President Obama, and I call Leon Panetta into the Oval office and ask him to tell me how Hamas leaders are holding up under the Israeli assault, will he be able to tell me?"

The former official shook his head, nearly blushing.   

No.  "That's not the kind of information" they focus on.

"Well, what do they focus on?" I asked.

If the viability of Hamas isn't important right now, what is?
 
He said the CIA, State Department and Pentagon intelligence agencies do have people specializing on the Palestinians, and even Hamas. But it's not likely they would have up-to-the-minute information on whether, say, in response to Israeli military pressure, its leaders are fighting among each other, unifying, or even where they are.

They just don't have that kind of stuff, he said.

Wow.

What about the NSA? I asked. Could the CIA's Hamas guy call his NSA counterpart and get cell phone intercepts from Gaza to help fill in some holes?

"They won't give it to him, because they don't want their information to help CIA look good."

Right.

And the National Intelligence Directorate, which was set up to put an end to that kind of horse play?

A work in progress, he smiled.  

Ok then: What can CIA briefers tell Obama about Hamas next Wednesday morning?

"They would tell them what they know," said, like squids squirting ink, until they could get back to headquarters and ask around.

But even then, said this former official, Panetta or Adm. Dennis Blair, the incoming head of National Intelligence, would probably not have anyone on staff to answer such specific questions.

Unbelievable, even to me.

He agreed: Unbelievable.

He nodded. "You tell people this and they don't believe it."

This from a man who has devoted his entire adult life to U.S. intelligence.

But doesn't the CIA have guys like Robert Redford in "Three Days of the Condor"? I asked, half joking, guys who read books, who specialize in more or less arcane things?

Doesn't it have people immersing themselves in subjects like Hamas, as intelligence intellectuals? A CIA version of New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman, to name just one of the better known?

Not so much any more, he said. There was a time when the CIA and other agencies hired and encouraged analysts to drill down deeply in, say, Chinese wheat harvests. 

But no longer, he insisted.  And there's little intellectual curiosity in the analyst ranks today, he maintained. A roguish kind of independence among the best journalists is neither sought, nor encouraged, in U.S. intelligence these days, he said.   

Everyone in the spy agencies is feverish about "current intelligence," writing reports that might get the attention of their bosses, maybe even the President of the United States, he said.

But isn't the current leadership structure of Hamas - I kept coming back to that - "current intelligence"?

No, not necessarily, he said. "Current intelligence" is the big-picture stuff that CIA chiefs like to show off to the president -- "what we know about Iran,"  usually larded with sexy secrets -- not necessarily what the president needs to know. 

It's quite likely that the analysts' bosses might not have asked them to track the state of Hamas, he said.  And when their bosses haven't tasked them with such a challenge, the analysts then to be "passive," fixating on a hot piece of secret information that came in over the transom, no matter how incidental to the more critical question: what's Hamas up to?

After much resistance, CIA and DNI finally did set up an Open Source Center with analysts, some of whom don't even have security clearances, working from unclassified material. And they've proved to be very good, some experts say, giving the spy agency a fresh view on developments ranging from Iran to North Korea. The final verdict is far from in, but one well informed former official said that on at least one subject he was familiar with, the regular CIA analysts "couldn't hold a candle" to the Open Source Center's product.

But of course, that begs the question of exactly what the 16 agencies of the so-called U.S. intelligence community -- who still hoard information like children at day care, according to most accounts -- are actually doing with $65 billion a year.

And what, especially, should be done to fix the CIA, with all those floors upon floors of people scattered across Northern Virgina gathering and analyzing secret information?  

"Blow up the place," my lunchtime guest said, "and start over."

Unfortunately, that's not a new idea, either.

"(T) he Israeli attack on Gaza, widely seen here as an act of aggression enabled by the United States, has become conflated in the minds of some Afghans with U.S. motives and actions in Afghanistan," she wrote on Jan. 5. 

"Taliban propaganda and sermons by conservative clerics," she adds, 'have contributed to a notion of the United States as an occupying power that seeks to subjugate the Muslim world."

"We have cable TV, and we know what the Americans are doing. First they attacked Iraq. They didn't find any nuclear weapons, but they killed a lot of Muslims. Now they are supporting Israel in killing innocent Palestinians. If they have come here to help us, we will welcome them. But if they come to destroy us, we will drive them out like we drove out the Russians. Real Muslims only need the protection of God."

"At best, it would be a tactical gain, but also an immense strategic loss," said Ali Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister and now a visiting professor at the National Defense University, noting that by fragmenting power and undermining the authority of the central government, the strategy in the long run could actually worsen the instability it sought to ameliorate.

He called this "effort to gain peace through manipulating tribal dynamics" a "colonial approach."

Careful planning, including extensive intelligence gathering and a "disinformation" campaign to lull Hamas into thinking an attack was not imminent, preceded Israel's dramatic assault on Gaza, according to a reputable Israeli newspaper.

"Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public - all these stood behind the Israel Defense Forces 'Cast Lead' operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, which began Saturday morning," Haaretz correspondent Barak Ravid reported.

The intelligence missions targeted Hamas's "permanent bases, weapon silos, training camps, the homes of senior officials and coordinates for other facilities," the paper said, citing "sources in the defense establishment."

Meanwhile, to mislead the Islamist Sunni group's leadership, "Israel continued to send out disinformation in announcing it would open the crossings to the Gaza Strip and that [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert would decide whether to launch the strike following three more deliberations on Sunday -- one day after the actual order to launch the operation was issued," the paper said.

Such preparations marked a dramatic departure from Israel's assault on Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon in July 2006, which quickly bogged down amid unexpectedly stiff resistance, analysts said.

Among the fiercest critics of the Lebanon campaign then was Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, notes my CQ colleague Jonathan Broder, who has reported on and in the Middle East for three decades, beginning with the Associated Press and Chicago Tribune.

 "Barak was very critical of Israel's lack of intelligence-gathering and other important preparations before the 2006 war against Lebanon, which resulted in Hezbollah's emerging victorious in the minds of many Arabs and the perception of Israel's deterrent capacity being badly damaged," Broder commented for me  "The precision of Israel's attacks against Hamas leaders and their installations this time shows that Barak was not going to make the same mistake."

But if Israel goes ahead with an anticipated ground assault, says James Abourezk, a Lebanese American former Democratic Senator from South Dakota, it will encounter "pretty stiff resistance." 

Hamas has about 25,000 fighters in Gaza, said Abourezk, who frequently leads citizen tour groups to Syria.

"So Israel might not launch a ground incursion because Hamas has some pretty tough fighters in there."

On the other hand, "Israel can do pretty much anything it wants" because of its firm backing from the United States in general and the Bush administration in particular, he said.

The White House and State Department have blamed Hamas's rocket attacks on Israel for precipitating the crisis.

"The violence will keep going until the U.S. puts a stop to it," Abourezk said.

Today Bush administration officials said they were working hard to restore a ceasefire in Gaza. 

Victor Comras, a longtime State Department diplomat and trade expert, argues that plunging oil prices and chaos in the international finance system could force Iran back to the bargaining table over its nuclear program.

Economic sanctions have also begun to show results, Comras said, as reports surfaced that the Bush administration was forcing Israel to stand down from plans to attack the Islamic republic.

"Iran's economy is already in shambles," Comras wrote for the widely read Counterterrorism Blog Tuesday.

"The downturn in the price of oil has left Iran's government with serious budget shortfalls and significantly reduced its ability to support and subsidize its extensive ongoing energy sector and other infrastructure projects," he said.

"It has also significantly reduced the profit incentives that previously enticed foreign businesses and banks to compete for Iran's business, even when that meant irritating their American relationships.

"Iran's cost of doing business is soaring, and the stepped up measures adopted by the U.S. Treasury Department, and the US campaign to dissuade financial dealings with Iran, are now actually having a significant impact! More and more Western banks are reducing their Iran exposure and pulling out of the Iran marketplace. Even non Western banks in Dubai are beginning to view triangular transactions with Iran more cautiously. These factors may serve to enhance the chances of engaging Iran in a more constructive dialogue on its nuclear program than previously."

Read the rest here.

A right-wing Jewish organization that backs John McCain is flooding mailboxes in the key battleground state of Virginia with an Israeli-made film that equates some Muslims with Nazis.

A man in Springfield, Va., whose family originates in South Asia, told us he was offended by the DVD, especially when it arrived in his mailbox again and again - seven times in all, he said.

"Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West," intercuts scenes of Islamist terrorist attacks with old film of Nazi rallies and contemporary footage of Muslim children reciting poetry celebrating suicide bombings.

"They should have a warning on them about the explicit violence," said the South Asian man, who is married with two young children.  He asked not to be identified for fear of upsetting his neighbors in his largely Republican neighborhood.

"My children pick up any DVD that's lying around and put it on," said the man. "It stereotypes all Muslims as ignorant and backward. I found it personally offensive, but I certainly don't want my children seeing that stuff."

Some 22 million DVDs were also delivered to homes via newspaper inserts in "100 local newspapers, with distribution concentrated in political swing states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada," Seth Hettena reported in Columbia Journalism Review.

"Obsession" was produced by Israeli filmmaker Raphael Shore, who is one of three officers of the Clarion Fund, which is sponsoring the Virginia mailings.  Adding mystery to the project, pseudonyms were used for two of the film's financial backers, because, Shore maintains, they feared reprisals by radical Muslims.

"'Obsession' gives the picture that unfortunately no one else does,"  Shore told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz back in June. "The average viewer tries to understand the conflict. It's difficult to connect all the dots and 'Obsession' does just that. It gives a coherence to a problem that people have been grappling with."

The Clarion Fund and associatyed groups are skirting the ban on nonprofit organizations backing political candidates, according to The Washington Post.

"One of the Clarion Fund's Web sites, http://www.radicalislam.com, posted an article two weeks ago that stated, 'McCain's policies seek to confront radical Islamic extremism and terrorism and roll it back while Obama's, although intending to do the same, could in fact make the situation facing the West even worse,'" the Post reported.

The article has since been pulled down, "but its Web site still links readers to a vast network of sites that promote McCain," The Post reported.

"Aside from the content itself, a number of other factors related to the film have fueled the flames of controversy," Haaretz reporter Daphna Berman wrote, singling out its "largely Jewish and pro-Israel distribution network."

David Ignatius has the gem down low in today's Washington Post column, which describes a half-hearted, even feckless U.S. covert action program to send operatives from Iraq into Iran.

He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.

Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.

Even the most successful bombing raid would leave Iran with some nuclear capability. At best, proponents of this option admit, bombing would set back the [nuclear] program five years. During that time the [White House] expectation is that the Iranian people miraculously would unseat the country's ruling clergy and dismantle the nuclear program permanently.

When Hoskinson listened to the interview, broadcast only in Arabic, he was startled to discover that ElBaradei had suddenly sliced years off his previous estimates of how long it would take Iran, if left alone, to build a bomb.

Nobody seemed to notice that ElBaradei said Saturday Iran would need only six months to a year to produce a nuclear weapon if it broke off talks and expelled IAEA inspectors. 

This seems like a huge shift: ElBaradei has consistently said that it could take Iran from three to eight years to make a weapon. Or sometimes, demurring on personal estimates but seeking to knock down the more inflammatory statements by some Bush administration figures, ElBaradei took refuge in the softer estimates on Iran by U.S. intelligence chief Mike McConnell and Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte. In October, for example, he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that Iran was "a few years" away from a bomb.   

Of course, last fall's controversial National Intelligence Estimate. also gave ElBaradei cover to throw cold water on the hawks' itching for an attack on Iran.   

But now it looks like ElBaradei's gone off the reservation. By the sound of last Saturday's interview, he's pulled much closer to what Israel is saying about the immediacy of the Iranian threat. 

Here's what he said on Al-Arabiya, the Saudi-owned station based in Dubai:

ELBaradei: "If Iran wants to turn to the production of nuclear weapons, it must leave the NPT [Nuclear Proliferation Treaty], expel the IAEA inspectors, and then it would need at least -- "

Interviewer: "How much time would it need?"

ElBaradei: "It would need at least six months to one year. Therefore, Iran will not be able to reach the point where we would wake up onemorning to an Iran with a nuclear weapon."

Six months is a lot better than a week, or overnight. But what happened to the eight-years estimated lag?

The interviewer seemed shocked by the sudden evaporation of seven years in ElBaradei's thinking, too. 

Interviewer: "Excuse me, I would like to clarify this for our viewers. If Iran decides today to expel the IAEA from the country, it will need six months..."

ElBaradei: "Or one year, at least --"

Interviewer: "-- to produce [nuclear] weapons?"

ElBaradei: "It would need this period to produce a weapon, and to obtain highly-enriched uranium in sufficient quantities for a single nuclear weapon." [...]

What's going on here?

My guess is that the IAEA chief may well be sick of recent Iranian behavior and wanted to send a message to Tehran (while cautioning Washington that Iran has the wherewithal to respond with fire).  

But the English-language media missed the first part.

In retrospect, ElBaradei's toughening -- if that's what it is -- should not come as such a surprise: Last month's IAEA report, after all, was tougher than previous ones, with a complaint that Iran was holding back on the inspectors.

ElBaradei, the most patient of diplomats, may be running out of patience with Iran.