Crush Liberalism

The NIE: fact or fiction?

I haven’t covered the National Intelligence Estimate report much, mainly because there’s been quite a bit of info out there about it.  In short, our intel community (which has been at war with the administration as much as, if not more so than, with Al Qaeda) released a report that says Iran doesn’t have nukes or the ability to make them.

Well, the Euros beg to differ, as do the Israelis.  As Allah puts it, you have no idea how much it stings to have the Euros telling us we’re naive about a threat!

British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons programme, as a US intelligence report claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran…

British intelligence is concerned that US spy chiefs were so determined to avoid giving President Bush a reason to go to war – as their reports on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes did in Iraq – that they got it wrong this time.

A senior British official delivered a withering assessment of US intelligence-gathering abilities in the Middle East and revealed that British spies shared the concerns of Israeli defence chiefs that Iran was still pursuing nuclear weapons.

The source said British analysts believed that Iranian nuclear staff, knowing their phones were tapped, deliberately gave misinformation. “We are sceptical. We want to know what the basis of it is, where did it come from? Was it on the basis of the defector? Was it on the basis of the intercept material? They say things on the phone because they know we are up on the phones. They say black is white. They will say anything to throw us off.

John Bolton describes the NIE as both “politics disguised as intelligence” and “quasi-putsch”, which is more diplomatic than I would be.

December 10, 2007 - Posted by crushliberalism | Euros, Iran, defeatism, intelligence