NIE on Iran vs Bush Administration
U.S. intel report on Iran was political: Bolton
BERLIN (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence services were seeking to influence political policy-making with their assessment Iran had halted its nuclear arms program in 2003, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said.
Deer Spiegel magazine quoted Bolton on Saturday as saying the aim of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), contradicting his and President George W. Bush's own oft-stated position, was not to provide the latest intelligence on Iran.
"This is politics disguised as intelligence," Bolton was quoted as saying in an article appearing in next week's edition.
Bolton described the NIE, released on Monday, as a "quasi-putsch" by the agencies, Deer Spiegel said.
The NIE said Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program four years ago but was continuing to develop the technical means that could be applied to producing weapons. This contradicted the oft-stated position of President Bush that Iran is actively trying to develop an atomic weapon.
The hawkish Bolton has long criticized Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the Vienna-based U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), for refusing to declare that there was hard evidence Tehran was trying to develop nuclear weapons.
ElBaradei said the new NIE "somewhat vindicated" Iran, which has always denied allegations it was secretly trying to build atom bombs.
Earlier this year Bolton said: "Regime change or the use of force are the only available options to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapons capability, if they want it."
U.S. intelligence has shouldered much of the blame for the Bush administration's unfounded allegations that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had revived his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, the official justification for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
I hope the American people, complacent and gullible as they have become, see Bolton's statement for what it is: a self-serving lie and a poor attempt to spin intelligence results that contradict his personally held world view.
Keep in mind that a combination of little intelligence on Iraq in the first two years of the Bush adminiistration, plus "intelligence" manufactured by the Bush administration to support its desire to go to war with Iraq, is what landed us in the current Iraq quagmire. The Bush administration took incomplete intelligence and jumped on it with demonic enthusiasm. Now we have a report that states that Iran is not as far along the road toward nuclear weapons and the Bush administration discounts and discredits it immediately, with almost the same enthusiasm.
Deja vu should be kicking in for any Americans who cared enough to pay attention to the news in 2002, when Mohammed al-Baradei said repeatedly that his UN inspection teams could not find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and he was ridiculed and insulted by the Bush administration. President Bush gave him an ultimatum to leave Iraq or he and his team would likely be killed during the subsequent invasion and of course to date during the US occupation of Iraq no WMDs have been found, proving al-Baradei right and the Bush administration absolutely wrong.
The latest NIE on Iran supports al-Baradei, and the Bush administration calls the report "politics."
More disrubing, of course, is chickenhawk John Bolton's narrow view of diplomacy: "Regime change or the use of force are the only available options to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapons capability, if they want it."
To a man whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Effective diplomacy requires a little more skill and finesse than that.