The Front-Page Story That Was Not

WASHINGTON — In all the hullabaloo surrounding Super Tuesday's primaries and caucuses, perhaps the most important news story of the day slipped from sight or was reported only in fragments. I have in mind our intelligence community's annual appearance before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. There our spy chiefs appeared to report how the war against terror is going.

How I wish I had a seat on that committee just for the day. I would have a few questions of my own. One would be, "Have any of you fellows detected the whereabouts of Boy Clinton?" Since the South Carolina primary when Bill fanned the smoldering embers of his party's white racism, America's most recent redneck president has slipped from sight.

As I reported in my book on Bill's restless life in retirement, "The Clinton Crack-Up," his record of campaigning for others is dismal. In 2004, of the 14 candidates he campaigned for, 12 lost. Doubtless Hillary's strategists are even now pondering where to hide the big lovable oaf lest he do her campaign any more injury. They might consider hiding Hillary, too. She is proving to be an implausible candidate.

But back to our spy chiefs' appearance on Capitol Hill; a more serious question that I would like to have asked would be about that National Intelligence Estimate of late 2007. Why were its claims about Iran's nuclear plans so out of sync with those that the Bush administration had been making? Contrary to the administration, the NIE report claimed Iran had halted its nuclear arms program. What is more, this report conflicted with intelligence from France, the U.K. and Israel. In fact, Israel's spy agency, Mossad, reported this very week that Iran will have nuclear weapons in three years. Gratefully, National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell explained the discrepancy. The NIE report was faulty.

As reported in The New York Sun, "The director of national intelligence is backing away from his agency's assessment." McConnell explained, "If I had till now to think about it, I probably would change a few things." One would be "the way we describe the Iranian nuclear program." The Iranians have halted work on nuclear warheads, said McConnell, but they proceed with the more dangerous business of attempting the enrichment of uranium and procuring the capacity to hit North Africa and Europe with nuclear arms. So I am putting my money on Mossad's reports.

McConnell also gave a grave warning to senators about the survival of Pakistan, telling them, "In the last year, the number of terrorist attacks and deaths were greater than the past six years combined." The terrorists include members of al-Qaida and the Taliban, all of whom threaten Pakistan's "very survival." Another news story coming from McConnell at these momentous hearings is that al-Qaida is planning more attacks against the United States and had a plan in the works for attacking the White House as recently as 2006. Homegrown al-Qaida cells here have been primitive, but McConnell registered his concern that new, more sophisticated cells might threaten us domestically in the years ahead.

All these news stories are pretty gloomy. Whether the Democratic presidential candidates admit it or not, we are in a war with Islamofascists that will go on for years. Rolling up our forces abroad and bringing them home will neither end nor ameliorate the threat.

But there was one spy chief on the Hill this week with good news. CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed that the CIA has used waterboarding and it works prodigiously. The agency only used this technique of simulated drowning three times since Sept. 11, saving it for terror leaders who have posed the utmost threat to our security: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole; Abu Zubaydah, the brains behind the thwarted millennium attacks; and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who directed Sept. 11 — as deserving a trio of barbarians as any waterboardist can imagine. From these brutes — and in the wink of an eye — Hayden reports the CIA got a quarter of all the human intelligence it obtained from 2002 to 2006. Now we also know that this impressive interrogation technique was undertaken not only with the knowledge of the Bush administration but also the knowledge of then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and then-ranking Senate Intelligence Committee member Jay Rockefeller.

So the news from our chief intelligence practitioners is not all bad. It is sobering, however, because it should have been on the front pages of newspapers throughout the country.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator, a contributing editor to The New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. His newest book is "The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President's Life After the White House." To find out more about R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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