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Bush complains bitterly that the "eye-popping" NIE "tied my hands on the military side," adding that the "NIE's conclusion was so stunning that I felt it would immediately leak to the press." He writes that he authorized declassification of the key findings "so that we could shape the news stories with the facts." Facts?
A disappointed Bush writes, "The backlash was immediate. [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad hailed the NIE as a 'great victory.'" Bush's apparent "logic" here is to use the widespread disdain for Ahmadinejad to discredit the NIE through association, i.e., whatever Ahmadinejad praises must be false.
An Embarrassment
How embarrassing it must have been for Bush and Cheney! Here before the world were the key judgments of an NIE, the most authoritative genre of intelligence report, unanimously approved "with high confidence" by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and signed by the Director of National Intelligence, saying, in effect, that Bush and Cheney were lying about the "Iranian nuclear threat." Just a month before the Estimate was issued, Bush was claiming that the threat from Iran could lead to "World War III."
In his memoir, Bush laments: "I don't know why the NIE was written the way it was. " Whatever the explanation, the NIE had a big impact -- and not a good one." Spelling out how the NIE had tied his hands "on the military side," Bush included this kicker:
Yet, that didn't stop neocon warmongers from trying. The NIE was subject to virulent criticism by those disappointed that it did not provide justification for a "preventive" attack on Iran.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, who has proudly described himself as the "anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA)," called the Iran NIE "deceptive." Hoekstra called it "a piece of trash."
Greg Thielmann, a former State Department official who had managed strategic intelligence analysis but quit before the intelligence debacle on Iraq, could not resist commenting on this bizarre set of circumstances from his new position as a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association: "There is some considerable irony in hearing such criticism from those intimately familiar with the inner workings of the intelligence community, who seemed to have sleep-walked through the serious professional lapses of the 2002 NIE on Iraq WMD."
But the neocons were deprived of the Iran war for which they had been lusting (just as, six years later, they were deprived of the war on Syria, into which they almost mouse-trapped President Barack Obama).
Still, you need not worry about any negative consequences for the compliant Bush-Cheney "analysts" who were willing to "fix" more intelligence around war policies. As usually happens in Official Washington, they landed on their feet. For instance, Fleitz is now Senior Vice President for Policy and Programs with the Center for Security Policy, a think tank founded by Frank Gaffney, Jr., an archdeacon of neocondom, who is still its president.
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