Bolton On The New NIE

John Bolton on the new NIE:

Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently
supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion
and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran
was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not
exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms
control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant
diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on
this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a
diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence
judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy
exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of
“intelligence.”

~~~

Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the
overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy,
where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming
home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very
deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it
can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known
information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a
disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.

Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not
intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department,
brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national
intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran’s
nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those
views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are
precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as “intelligence
judgments.”

And what was the most recent piece of data?

According to current and former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the matter, the information that surfaced this summer included intercepted conversations of Iranian officials discussing the country’s nuclear weapons program, as well as a journal from an Iranian source that documented decisions to shut it down. [Well, those certainly sound authoritative…]

“When we first got some of this stuff, the fact that we got it was exciting,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the subject. He said the information was obtained as part of a stepped-up effort targeting Iran that President Bush had ordered in 2005, but the problem with it “was digesting it to know what we had.”

The information triggered a cascade of recalculations across the 16 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, the official said. Analysts at the CIA and elsewhere began to revisit classified reports that they had scrutinized repeatedly in recent years. As they did so, officials said, they saw details that added up to the new conclusion.

Unbelievable.

So in 2005 our Intelligence Agencies connected the dots of information to form a picture that stated they had a high degree of confidence Iran was building a nuke.  Two years later then get a few new dots, some conversations and a journal, and erase the entire previous picture and draw a new one.  As Bolton said “It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it
can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known
information.” and a few conversations along with a journal is not that rare piece of intelligence.

Instead we need to look at the motive behind the NIE.  In particular the writers themselves who are not intelligence agents but instead are career diplomats with a interest in being proven right about Iran.  Brill, former US Ambassador to the IAEA, Diepen, former National Intelligence Officer for WMD, and Fingar, formerly in Intelligence and Research inside the State Department.

All hyper-partisan Bush-hating diplomats.

So while the BDS inflicted Intelligence agents cheer, so does Ahmedanutjob. 

Curt

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