My mornings begin with coffee â how did I ever get through high school without coffee? â and the “News Items” newsletter from John Ellis, longtime NBC News poobah whose reputation for led his hobby of collecting key stories and circulating a summary of them to friends and family to become an influential summary of the key stories from overnight as well as the obscure and the incredible (but always true and very well sourced).
Johns missive had been my 6 AM companion for so many years that when he decided to expand the shop, I was one of scores of recipients who said “Hey, Ill invest a few bucks to grow that project â the country needs one newsletter that does not spin and cant be spun,” and over the next many years its grown into a replacement for the long march through the legacy outlets for an AM update on the worlds news.
“News Items” doesnt have a slant, so when it opens with a “Well that really matters!” moment, I paused and considered its vast implications. Wednesdays “News Items” began this way:
“1. The Trump administrations public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities. Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway. People with knowledge of the assessments said they show â to varying degrees, depending on the level of damage incurred at the different sites â that the Iranians can use mobile launchers that are inside the sites to move missiles to other locations. In some cases they can launch missiles directly from launchpads that are part of the facilities. Only three of the missile sites along the strait remain totally inaccessible, according to the assessments.”
Having given up on years ago â and the already infamous “rape-trained dogs” column from Nicholas Kristof must have sent more subscribers who relied on the platform for actual news as opposed to recipes and puzzles or The Athletic to the exits â I would not have known about that report early yesterday but for “News Items.”
The newsletter can certainly be trusted to provide a faithful summary of a story from a platform that is not trusted by the center-right, but a story of consequence nonetheless.
The â presumably the lead agency for the assessment that was leaked â is currently led by the very competent John Ratcliffe. But the CIA has a checkered record on Iran from 1979 when they didnt see the Islamic Republic coming (much less what it portended) to 2007 when its “assessment” of Irans nuclear ambitions wholly missed the mark. That 2007 debacle should haunt consumers of this report:
“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”
So declared the opening words of the key judgments of the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on “Iran’s Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities.” The CIA might have had collaborators in the broader Intelligence Community in that enormous “swing and a miss” of an NIE 19 years ago, but the damage it did in handcuffing President regarding Iran in his closing months was vast.
Of course President Obama spent eight years trying to find ways to welcome Iran into the community of nations âincluding the now infamous pallets of cash Obama sent the IRGC as part of the JCPOWâperhaps not realizing because of that 2007 NIE that the Islamic Republic was and would always remain a rogue and dangerous theocracy run by a two lunatic dictators in succession since 1979, fanatics whose whole plan was to build and use nuclear weapons to end first and then any other opponent of its end
