On Friday, Fred Fleitz posted an article at American Greatness about the intelligence failures regarding the Iranian nuclear program.
The article includes a brief biography of Fred Fleitz:
Fred Fleitz previously served as National Security Council chief of staff, CIA analyst, and a House Intelligence Committee staff member. He was a member of the CIA Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center and served as a U.S. delegate to the IAEA Board of Governors.
Obviously he knows what he is talking about.
The article reports:
The recent Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment claiming that the U.S. bombing of Iran set the country’s nuclear weapons program back only a few months was irresponsible and probably intended to undermine President Trump’s foreign policy. This assessment was written to be leaked to the press and reflected a long pattern of politicized intelligence analysis to undermine Republican presidents.
The DIA assessment was not credible because a battle damage assessment of the bombing of Iran’s Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear sites will be complicated and probably take weeks or months of intelligence collection and analysis by dozens of experts and other intelligence agencies. A low-confidence assessment, like the DIA analysis issued 24 hours after the bombings, was a fraud and an abuse of intelligence to produce a high-profile assessment that deliberately misrepresented the outcome of the U.S. attack and helped the president’s political adversaries use the bombings to hurt him politically. Not surprisingly, this assessment was quickly leaked to the press.
The DIA assessment followed similar efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies and the left to deny that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.
The article notes one of the reasons for previous misreporting:
Prior to 2007, the U.S. Intelligence Community had assessed that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. But in November 2007, fearing that President Bush might order an attack on Iran’s nuclear program, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was published by the National Intelligence Council that found Iran’s nuclear program was halted in 2003 and Iranian leaders had not made a decision to resume weaponization efforts and construct a nuclear weapon.
Our government agencies need to remember that the President is an elected official and that they are not!
The article concludes:
The DIA assessment is a wake-up call about the serious problem of politicized U.S. intelligence analysis. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has begun to address this problem by reassigning National Intelligence Council senior analysts for politicizing national intelligence estimates. Much more must be done to depoliticize American intelligence analysis and win back the confidence of President Trump.
Let’s go back to where patriotism was more important than political parties.
