Gareth Porter: Bolton's Sleazy Attack on the NIE

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Bolton's Sleazy Attack on the NIE

Posted December 6, 2007 | 03:33 PM (EST)

John Bolton's attack in today's WaPo on the Iran NIE and its unwelcome conclusion that Iran stopped work related to nuclear weapons in fall 2003 makes it clear that the Cheney faction is furious at the intelligence community and still trying to discredit its primary judgment.

Bolton was an integral part of the neoconservative cabal's efforts to promote a policy of military force against Iran before he left the administration a year ago. Unlike the rantings of Norman Podhoretz', his views reflect his continuing contact with the neoconservatives still on Cheney's team.

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In the past the neoconservatives have seen intelligence community as a "soft target" which they could both attack with relative impunity and bend to their will. They succeeded in cowing much of the community into submission in 2002, when the Iraq NIE, completed in just nineteen days, said Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs, despite the lack of evidence to support that conclusion. Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin writes in his excellent new book Curveball that the analysts had been given "clear marching orders" and quotes one of them as saying, "The going-in assumption was we were going to war so this NIE was to be written with that in mind".

That represented a humiliating defeat for the professionals at the CIA and other intelligence agencies. That's part of the reason why, when faced with pressure from Cheney's people to back away from a conclusion the White House didn't like this time around, the analytical community held its ground.

The chickens hatched in that ruthless 2002 exercise have now come home to roost. A united intelligence community can have an impact on the political process when it refuses to cave in. The Bolton attack on it underlines the fact that the war party knows that the release of the NIE represents a cataclysmic political defeat for its strategy.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-gareth-porter/boltons-sleazy-attack-on_b_75673.html?view=print