McConnell Defends Iran NIE Against the RightFaced with the inconvenient assessment that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program, GOP Senators are running an old game plan: create a commission that will treat the truth and a lie as equal possibilities. However, Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, is unequivocally standing by the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.
The Washington Post reports that GOP Senators John Ensign (R-NV) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) want to create a commission on the NIE that will, inevitably, trash it. For some historical perspective on how frequently the right has gone after intelligence assessments that conflict with desired conservative policy preferences, read Ilan Goldenberg. His bottom line: “In all of these cases conservatives played with and disregarded intelligence to help make their cases for a particular policy. And in all of these cases the conservatives were wrong.” But he might have added something else: in all of these cases the conservatives were successful, despite being, you know, wrong.
Meanwhile, others on the right see something more nefarious at work. Danielle Pletka of AEI smears the entire intelligence community to the Post without any evidence: “This NIE was presented with a clear intention to deceive…” Similarly, in The New Republic, Yossi Klein Halevi doesn’t bother addressing the new intelligence that prompted the Iran volte-face, and simply says the U.S. has lost “the will to stop Tehran” from doing something that Tehran isn’t doing.
The intelligence community isn’t backing down in the face of the right-wing pressure. “We certainly stand by the product,” says DNI spokeswoman Vanee Vines. “It represents the consensus of intelligence community. That was clear when we released it. … We stand by it as comprehensive and accurate.” But don’t expect the braying from the right about appeasement and betrayal to cease.