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US reversal on Iran intel reflects breaking of the ranks: analysts AFP The US reversal on Iran's nuclear weapons program has exposed a breaking of ranks within a waning administration, with US intelligence and military professionals asserting themselves on issues of war and peace, analysts said. Senior US intelligence officials said this week they were responding to new information, subjected to more rigorous analysis than in the past, in declaring with "high confidence" that Iran halted a covert nuclear weapons program in 2003. But their willingness to set aside all previous assumptions flowed from a determination not to repeat the errors made in 2002, when bogus intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction set the United States on a course to war, they said.
And unlike 2002, when US intelligence officials complained of administration pressure to "cherry-pick" intelligence that supported going to war, the intelligence community this time has asserted its independence. "This is ours," a senior intelligence official said this week, telling reporters that policymakers had no input in the conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate, as the assessment is called. The US military also increasingly has taken its own tack since the ouster of Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary, quietly but firmly distancing itself from White House saber rattling on Iran.
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