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How a Government Report Spread a Questionable Claim About Iran

Tuesday, 15 January 2013 06:14

Written by Propublica

Several media outlets reported this month on an alarming finding from a new U.S. government study: Iran’s intelligence ministry, as CNN put it, constitutes “a terror and assassination force 30,000 strong.”

The claim that the intelligence ministry has a whopping 30,000 employees, first reported by a conservative website, spread to other outlets including Wired and the public radio show the Takeaway and landed elsewhere online, even on the intelligence ministry’s Wikipedia page. All cited the new government study, put out by an arm of the Library of Congress called the Federal Research Division.

So how did the government researchers come up with the number? They searched the Internet — and ended up citing an obscure, anonymous website that was simply citing another source.

The trail on the 30,000 figure eventually ends with a Swedish terrorism researcher quoted in a 2008 Christian Science Monitor article. But the researcher, Magnus Ranstorp, said he isn’t sure where the number came from. “I think obviously that it would be an inflated number” of formal employees, said Ranstorp.

We inquired with six Iran experts, and none knew of any evidence for the figure. Some said it might be in the ballpark while others questioned its plausibility.

“Whether the figures emanate from Iran or from western reporting, they are generally exaggerated and either meant as self-aggrandizing propaganda, if self-reported by Iran, or just approximations based on usually scant data or evidence,” said Afshon Ostovar, a senior Middle East analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses who writes frequently on Iran. The number “could be more or less accurate, but there's no way to know.”

Gary Sick, a longtime Iran specialist in and out of government, said the entire Federal Research Division study “has all the appearance of a very cheap piece of propaganda and should not be trusted."

Sick pointed to the study’s use of questionable Internet sources as well as flat-out errors. In one section, for example, the study lays out in detail how “Iran’s constitution defines” the intelligence ministry’s official functions. The problem, as Sick notes: Iran’sconstitution doesn’t mention an intelligence ministry, let alone define its functions.

Federal Research Division Chief David Osborne said in an email the report “was leaked to the media without authorization” and declined to comment further “because it is proprietary to the agency for which it was written.”

This is that we know about the 30,000 figure and its provenance:

On the morning of Jan. 3, the conservative Washington Free Beacon ran astory headlined, “Iran Spy Network 30,000 Strong.” The outlet said it had obtained a “64-page unclassified report” on the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, and published it with the story.

The Federal Research Service of the Library of Congress, which produced the study,provides “fee for service” research to other government agencies using the resources of the library. The study’s title page names no author but says it was produced under an agreement with an arm of the Pentagon called the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office. (That office did not respond to requests for comment.)

The study flatly states that Iran’s intelligence ministry has “more than 30,000 officers and support personnel.”

But it also hedges. It notes Iranian intelligence is “a difficult subject to study because so little information about it is publicly available.” The study does not claim to feature any original intelligence or reporting. It says its main sources are news websites and Iranian blogs.

“The reliability of blog-based information may be questionable at times,” says the report. “But it seems prudent to evaluate and present it in the absence of alternatives.”

The evening after the report was first published, CNN ran a segment on what it called “troubling new details on a new report of Iran's intelligence service.” The story compared the 30,000 figure to the roughly 100,000 employees in the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies and offices, and went through various attacks over the years attributed to Iranian intelligence.

A CNN spokeswoman said the network “checked the number with sources that led us to feel comfortable that the report was in line with the national security community's understanding."

As support for the 30,000 claim, the study cites a post on a website, iranchannel.org, which aggregates news critical of Iran’s government.

That post, from 2010, turns out to merely excerpt another study from yet another source.

That study, titled “Shariah: The Threat to America,” was put out by the hawkish Center for Security Policy. As the title suggests, it doesn’t focus on Iran but rather the purported threat of Islamic law.

The study briefly mentions that Iran’s intelligence ministry has “up to some 30,000 officers and support staff.” Its source: the 2008 article in the Christian Science Monitor.

That piece refers to Iran’s intelligence ministry having “some 30,000 on the payroll by one count,” which came from Ranstorp, the Swedish terrorism researcher.

Ranstorp told us that while he did not recall citing the figure to the Monitor, it might have originated with Kenneth Katzman, a Mideast specialist with the Congressional Research Service who often writes on Iran.

Katzman told us that the figure did not come from him. He added that 30,000 did not seem “inordinately unreasonable” but that he does not know of evidence supporting it.

Bill Gertz, the Washington Free Beacon reporter who obtained and published the Federal Research Service study, told ProPublica he stands by his story.

"In my 30-plus years in reporting on national security issues, I have found that such unclassified reports often use press reporting of such numbers to avoid having to use classified information,” Gertz said. “I also know that most of the people who write such reports have access to classified information about the subjects they write about and I doubt they would publish a figure that would be contradicted by classified assessments of the number of personnel in the [intelligence ministry]."

Gertz also pointed to another report on Iran, this one produced in 2010 by private intelligence firm Stratfor. But that report says that, as of 2006, Iran’s intelligence ministry had just 15,000 employees. It does not cite a source for the figure.

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UN CHIEF DISAPPOINTED AT SYRIAN LEADER'S SPEECH

Monday, 07 January 2013 13:00

Written by Administrator

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UNITED NATIONS (AP) — U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expressing disappointment that Syrian President Bashar Assad has rejected the most important elements in a roadmap to end his country's 22-month conflict — a political transition and establishment of a transitional governing body.

Assad in a speech Sunday dismissed any chance of dialogue with the armed opposition and called on Syrians to fight what he called "murderous criminals."

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky on Monday said the secretary-general is disappointed that Assad's speech "does not contribute to a solution that could end the terrible suffering of the Syrian people."

Nesirky said Ban and U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi will continue to work for a political transition that leads to U.N.-organized elections.

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Meet the Think Tankers Advising the U.S. Military in Kabul

Monday, 03 December 2012 07:21

Written by Propublica

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by Justin Elliott, ProPublica

Amid the media frenzy over former CIA director David Petraeus’ extramarital affair, we were struck by a quick reference in a Washington Post story about Petraeus’ time running the war in Afghanistan:

Prominent members of conservative, Washington-based defense think tanks were given permanent office space at his headquarters and access to military aircraft to tour the battlefield. They provided advice to field commanders that sometimes conflicted with orders the commanders were getting from their immediate bosses.

So who were these think-tankers and what exactly were they doing?

We spoke to some of them.

The most prominent and frequent traveler appears to have been the American Enterprise Institute’s Fred Kagan. Best known as the intellectual author of the Iraq surge strategy, Kagan said he and his wife, Kimberley Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War, spent a total of about 270 days in Afghanistan while Petraeus was in command from summer 2010 to summer 2011, and about 128 days under Gen. John Allen, who took command after Petraeus and remains in the position.

Like others we spoke with, Kagan said Petraeus and other generals have routinely brought think tankers to both Iraq and Afghanistan, both to solicit outside advice and to shape the debate back home.

“General Petraeus liked to talk about ‘directed telescopes’ to describe people who go down to lower echelons and see what’s going on and go back and help the commander get a better sense of that,” says Kagan, who added that he has been going on such trips since 2007. The other aim of the trips was for the military to “help inform people who were going to be writing in the national debate to understand what was going on on the ground.”

Responding to the Post’s characterization about the military resources made available to think tank members during Petraeus’ time in charge in Afghanistan, Kagan said: “Everybody who travels to Afghanistan or any combat zone at the invitation of the military is given access to military aircraft.”

On the issue of providing advice to field commanders that conflicted with advice of their bosses, Kagan said: “We were always very careful to say we are not giving you orders, we’re not passing on orders. We’re not doing anything except giving you our opinion.”

Defense Department spokesman Bill Speaks told ProPublica that the Pentagon often reaches out to such outside experts to advise war commanders.

“We do periodically invite those experts involved in relevant research to receive briefings on the status of the campaign,” Speaks said in an email. He said the military does not have a comprehensive list of think tank members who have visited the U.S. headquarters in Kabul.

Indeed, the trips do not appear to have been part of any formal program, and they often differed in length and purpose.

Other think tankers we spoke with say they spent much less time in Afghanistan than Kagan, usually a few weeks or less. Those who have participated are from both Republican- and Democratic-leaning think tanks and they said they were not compensated.

“We did battlefield circulation, visited units in the field, and met with local political and security leaders,” says John Nagl, a retired Army officer and current fellow at the Center for a New American Security who took one military trip to Iraq and two to Afghanistan.

Nagl — who said attendees were responsible for getting to Kabul on their own and the military then covered transportation, lodging, and food — believed the trips allowed him “to be better informed in my analysis and advocacy.”

Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who has taken the trips several times to both Iraq and Afghanistan, says the practice first became common under Petraeus during the surge in Iraq in 2007.

Kenneth Pollack, also of Brookings, credits a 2007 military trip to Iraq with prompting he and O’Hanlon to write an influential New York Times op-ed supporting Petraeus’ surge strategy in the country.

“I hesitate to say these trips are uniformly good or bad. They can be both, they can be neither,” Pollack told us. “It so depends on the people you meet and the people you’re taking” on the trip. At times “there’s no question they’re trying to have you see things the way that they see them. But if you’re smart about it, you can get past that.”

Max Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has also gone on the trips. He declined to comment.

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Hungary's Orban says crisis may overstretch Europe's democracies

Thursday, 11 October 2012 06:19

Written by super admin

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BERLIN (Reuters) - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Europe's democracies might not be up to coping with the crisis they face, making the case in an interview for the "presidential" form of leadership that has let him drive through tough reforms at home.

A fiercely independent leader whose economic and social policies have drawn protests from foreign investors, governments and international bodies, Orban told German business daily Handelsblatt he was "a passionate supporter of democracy".

"But the question has to be asked if the leadership structures in democratic systems are still up to the times," he said, citing the challenges of dealing with sovereign debt crises and reforming social welfare states.

That could not become a taboo in the event of a weakness of leadership, Orban said in an interview published hours ahead of a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"Our current democratic systems have built-in weaknesses," he said, referring to Europe. "A presidential system is probably more suitable than a parliamentary system in times when difficult reforms need to be pushed through."

Since winning an election in 2010, Orban has drawn heavy criticism from among others the European Union and the International Monetary Fund for pushing through reforms that opponents say threaten the independence of the country's media, judiciary and central bank.

He has yielded ground on some of these issues.

Orban said U.S. presidents had the power to push through tough decisions "against the will of the people if they are important for the country's future".

Within five years, Europe would be debating whether it needed stronger presidents based on that model.

"The longer the (debt) crisis lasts, the louder the calls will be for strong political leadership," he said. "We've got to find democratic answers to that as soon as possible."

The government, dominated by Orban's Fidesz party, has a two-thirds majority in parliament. It is among the most stable in the EU even though public support for the party has crumbled to around 16-18 percent, according to opinion polls that also showed half the electorate undecided.

In the interview, Orban also said it would be irresponsible for Hungary to join the euro now as the key lesson to be learned from the debt crisis was that southern states had joined the currency zone before they were ready.

"We are not going to repeat that mistake," he said.

(Additional reporting by Gergely Szakacs in Budapest; Editing by John Stonestreet)

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F.A.Q. on U.S. Aid to Egypt: Where Does the Money Go—And Who Decides How It’s Spent?

Wednesday, 10 October 2012 05:22

Written by Propublica

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by Marianne Wang & Theodoric Meyer-Propublica

The regime change in Egypt — and in particular, the riots outside the American embassy last month — have prompted renewed questions about American aid to the country. (A recent poll found that 42 percent of Americans supported cutting aid to Egypt; 29 percent supported cutting it off altogether.)

We've taken a step back and tried to answer some basic questions, including how much the U.S. is giving Egypt, what's changed since the Arab Spring and who is benefiting from all this aid money.

How much does the U.S. spend on Egypt?

Egypt gets the most U.S. foreign aid of any country except for Israel. (This doesn't include the money spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.) The exact amount varies from year to year and there are many different funding streams, but U.S. foreign assistance to Egypt has averaged about $2 billion a year since 1979, when Egypt struck a peace treaty with Israel following the Camp David accords, according to the Congressional Research Service. That includes military and economic aid, though the latter has declined by more than two-thirds since 1998, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report.

Let's start with the military aid. How much is it, and what does it buy?

Military aid — which comes through a funding stream known as Foreign Military Financing — has held steady at about $1.3 billion since 1987. American officials have long argued that the money promotes strong ties between the American and Egyptian militaries, which gives the U.S. all kinds of benefits. U.S. Navy warships, for instance, get "expedited processing" when they pass through the Suez Canal.

Here's a 2009 U.S. embassy cable released by WikiLeaks that makes essentially the same point:

President Mubarak and military leaders view our military assistance program as the cornerstone of our mil-mil relationship and consider the USD 1.3 billion in annual FMF as "untouchable compensation" for making and maintaining peace with Israel. The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the U.S. military enjoys priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace.

The military funding also enables Egypt to purchase U.S.-manufactured military goods and services. But a 2006 report from the Government Accountability Office (PDF) criticized both the State Department and the Defense Department for failing to measure how the funding actually contributes to U.S. goals.

Does this aid require Egypt to meet any specific conditions regarding human rights?

It didn't for a long time. When an exiled Egyptian dissident called on the U.S. to attach conditions to aid to Egypt in 2008, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., who had recently stepped down as the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, told the Washington Post the idea was "admirable but not realistic." And Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that military aid "should be without conditions" at a Cairo press conference in 2009.

Last December Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, led Congress in adding language to a spending bill to make aid to Egypt conditional on the secretary of state certifying that Egypt is supporting human rights and being a good neighbor. The language requires that Egypt abide by the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, support "the transition to civilian government including holding free and fair elections," and put in place policies to protect freedom of expression, association, and religion, and due process of law." It sounds pretty tough, but it's not.

So has American aid to Egypt been cut off?

No. Congress threatened to block the aid when Egypt began a crackdown on a number of American pro-democracy groups this winter. A senior Obama administration official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had no way to certify the bill's conditions were being met.

But in March Clinton waived the certification requirement (yes, she can do that) and approved the aid, despite concerns remaining about Egypt's human rights record. The reason? "A delay or cut in $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt risked breaking existing contracts with American arms manufacturers that could have shut down production lines in the middle of President Obama's re-election campaign," the New York Times reported. Breaking the contracts could have left the Pentagon on the hook for $2 billion.

Oy vey. What kind of arms have we been sending them, anyway?

According to the State Department, the aid has included fighter jets, tanks, armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters, antiaircraft missiles, and surveillance aircraft. In the past, the Egyptian government has bought some of the weaponry on credit.

What about economic aid and efforts to promote democracy?

U.S. economic aid to Egypt has slumped from $815 million in 1998 to about $250 million in 2011.

The various economic aid efforts have had mixed results. The State Department has described the Commodity Import Program, which gave Egypt millions of dollars between 1986 and 2008 to import American goods, as "one of the largest and most popular USAID programs." But an audit of the four-year, $57 million effort to create agricultural jobs and boost rural incomes in 2007 found that the program "has not increased the number of jobs as planned" [PDF]. And an audit of a $151 million program [PDF] to modernize Egypt's real estate finance market in 2009 found that, while the market had improved since the program began, the growth was "not clearly measureable or attributable" to the aid efforts.

The U.S. has also funded programs to promote democracy and good government in Egypt — again with few results. It has sent about $24 million a year between 1999 and 2009 to a variety of NGOs in the country. According to a 2009 inspector general's audit [PDF], the efforts didn't add much due to "a lack of support" from the Egyptian government, which "suspended the activities of many U.S. NGOs because Egyptian officials thought these organizations were too aggressive."

A WikiLeaks cable revealed the Egyptian government had asked USAID to stop financing NGOs that weren't properly registered.

President Obama has promised Egypt $1 billion in aid to support its transition to democracy following the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. But the funding has become a political issue since the attacks on the American embassy in Cairo on Sept. 11. When the Obama administration announced last month that it was sending the Egyptian government $450 million to help forestall a budget crisis, Representative Kay Granger, a Texas Republican and the chairwoman of a subcommittee that oversees foreign aid, said she would block the money because of concerns about Egypt's direction under the Muslim Brotherhood. "I am not convinced of the urgent need for this assistance and I cannot support it at this time," she said in a statement.

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