The neo-cons strike back

[bemildred]

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Meanwhile, neo-conservatives and former Bush officials have launched a ferocious counterattack on the NIE, and more pointedly at its authors - the intelligence officers whose presumable goal is to undermine the Bush policy agenda.

"I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view ... that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons," wrote Norman Podhoretz in the right-wing Commentary Magazine.

"But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is the intelligence community, which has for so many years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W Bush, is doing it again."

In the opinion pages of the Washington Post, former US envoy to the United Nations John Bolton was more pointed, accusing the NIE of being polluted by "refugees from the State Department" who were brought into the new central bureaucracy of the Director of National Intelligence, a position created in the response to the September 11 Commission assessments on US intelligence failures. Bolton also criticized the intelligence community for engaging in "policy formulation" rather than "intelligence analysis", and said that the new estimate was based on a bias given to a new piece of information that could not decisively negate all previous knowledge.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IL11Ak03.html

[ixion]

1. hey, Norm, the belief that Iraq had WMD's was NEVER Universal

quite the opposite, in fact.

[jimshoes]

2. These guys have really gone

round the bend. Neo-conism should be declared a disease and be eradicated.

[Jim__]

3. No Evidence Iran Building Nuclear Weapons : Mohamed ElBaradei - 10/28/07

Sorry norm. Wrong again. link

[DrDan]

4. if you don't like the message . . . shoot the messenger . . .