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Former CIA Officials: Bush Iran Claims "Preposterous" Thomas B. Edsall and Max Follmer Four former CIA officials who provided intelligence information to past presidents described as preposterous President Bush's claim that he was unaware until very recently that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. "It's unbelievable," said Melvin Goodman, who worked for the CIA from 1966 to 1990 and now is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. Goodman's assessment of Bush's assertions were very similar to those of Larry C. Johnson, who worked at the CIA from 1985 to 1989 and from 1989 to 1993 served as Deputy Director in the U.S. State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism; Ray McGovern, a former CIA official who gave daily intelligence briefings to George H. W. Bush while he was vice president; and Bruce Riedel, who spent over two decades at both the CIA and National Security Council and is the former National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asian Affairs
At a December 4 (Tuesday) press conference, Bush asserted: I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was Mike
McConnell [Director of National Intelligence] came in and said, 'we have
some new information.' He didn't tell me what the information was; he
did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze.
Riedel agreed, saying "the president either chose to ignore what he heard or his director of national intelligence is not doing his job." Riedel said he doubted McConnell failed to "do his part of the bargain." "To me it is almost mind boggling that the President is told by the DNI that we have new important information on Iran and he doesn't ask 'what is that information?'" said Riedel, who is now a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center For Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He said it wasn't the DNI's responsibility to tell the President to "stop hyperventilating about the Iranian threat." "The President and his policy advisers - National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley in particular - have the responsibility of keeping their eye on the intelligence and to take into account new information as it comes along," Riedel told The Huffington Post. Bush and Cheney have repeatedly warned of the dangers of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, with no mention of the intelligence findings that Iran had stopped its program in 2003. On October 17, Bush was asked at a press conference, "But you definitively believe Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon?" He replied I think so long -- until they suspend and/or make it clear that they
-- that their statements aren't real, yeah, I believe they want to have
the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon. And I
know it's in the world's interest to prevent them from doing so. I believe
that the Iranian -- if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous
threat to world peace. But this -- we got a leader in Iran who has announced
that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested
in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in
preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.
I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously. Q ...Was there any indication from McConnell of the nature of the intelligence
in the meeting in August?
When that information first became available to the CIA and other agencies, it would automatically have been included in the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) months before the NIE report, Johnson said. The President, Vice President, Defense Secretary and Secretary of State are all given daily accounts of the PDB, Johnson said. McGovern and Goodman agreed.
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