UPDATE #2 French Presdent Sarkozy seems to agree with Bolton.
UPDATE: Bolton is not giving up his attack on the NIE. Too bad he is not in government anymore but he is still helping defend the country.
Bolton yesterday ripped the intelligence “community” a new one over the recently released NIE. A few memorable quotes:”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.” He also points out a real concern: “the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism.” All in all, this looks more like another of Timmerman’s Shadow Warrior exercises.
Maybe a little crude, but I’m drawing a few parallels between people who go into our intelligence services, and the mall shooter in Omaha: narcissistic personalities looking for a way to make themselves important, no matter who gets hurt.
You might be interested to know that only 18% of the US public believes them. Interestingly, only 16% of the women in the survey believed the Iranians have stopped their weapons program. Maybe women have more experience being lied to.