Forget WMD. What's an NIE? [View All]

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14495-2003Jul19.html

The report for the president was chilling.

"We believe that Iraq has intensified its efforts in recent years to develop technologies that could support a nuclear weapons program," said the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), citing reports about "the existence of secret nuclear projects at Tuwaitha and elsewhere." The NIE, encapsulating the government's best intelligence, also raised the alarm about chemical weapons. "In our judgment, the Iraqis highly value the effectiveness of chemical weapons against massed infantry. . . ."

The date of the NIE: Dec. 1, 1988.

Fourteen years later, in October 2002, another NIE on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction helped prod the United States to war. But whereas the 1988 report has been partially declassified and posted on the CIA Web site, the more recent one remains largely secret. On Friday, the White House released a small portion of the 2002 NIE as it sought to show that President Bush did not present a misleading picture of Iraq's weapons capability in his January State of the Union address. Critics have said Bush should not have charged that Iraq, in an effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, sought to buy uranium oxide from an African nation when the NIE had left doubt about that allegation.

What exactly is a National Intelligence Estimate? How are dissenting opinions expressed? And should the president be expected to read the NIEs himself, rather than receive summaries from his top aides?

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