George W. Bush and the peril of ignoring intelligence

Fred Kaplan writes in Slate about George W. Bush's cavalier dismissal of the National Intelligence Estimate showing that Iran has dismantled its nuclear weapons program:

In the latest Newsweek, Michael Hirsh reports that, during a private conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Bush "all but disowned" the agencies' Dec. 3 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. A "senior administration official who accompanied Bush" on the trip confided to Hirsh that Bush "told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views."

The NIE—which was signed by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies—concluded "with high confidence" that Iran had "halted its nuclear weapons program" back in the fall of 2003. The estimate, released to the public in sanitized form, seriously undercut efforts by the Bush-Cheney White House to portray Iran's nuclear ambitions as an imminent threat—and left the world either relieved or (especially in Israel's case) alarmed that the option of a U.S. airstrike on Iran was pretty much off the table.

[snip]

For the president of the United States to wave away the whole document—which, in its classified form, is more than 140 pages and has nearly 1,500 source notes, according to an enlightening story in today's Wall Street Journal—is gratuitous and self-destructive.

Then again, such behavior is of a piece with the pattern of relations between President Bush and his intelligence agencies. In September 2004, when he was asked about a pessimistic CIA report on the course of the occupation in Iraq, Bush replied that the agency was "just guessing."

Until now, the most glaring incident of George W. Bush choosing to ignore intelligence was his response to the infamous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing. In his book "The One Percent Doctrine", Ron Suskind states that the CIA briefer who brought this document to George Bush while the latter was on vacation in Crawford during the summer of 2001 was met with the response, "All right. You've covered your ass now." To me, this has always been some of the most damning evidence of at least some degree of presidential foreknowledge that SOMETHING was going to happen. Whether the details were known remains to be seen. Of course it's entirely possible that the response was just the reaction of a spoiled brat not wanting to deal with work during a vacation well-deserved (*snark*) after seven months on the job; seven months in which he had to deal with the captivity of pilots of a U.S. spy plane in china after a collision with a Chinese jet fighter and the embarrassment of a submarine in which rich Republican oil tycoons were allowed to take a turn at the wheel colliding with and sinking a Japanese fishing boat.

It's hard to imagine a more demoralized group than those working for U.S. intelligence agencies, after seven years in which delivery of a document showing that an attack on the U.S. was likely was angrily dismissed, an agent working in nonofficial cover on nuclear nonproliferation activities was outed because the President and Vice President were pissed at her husband for calling them on their lies, and an exhaustive report on Iran's nuclear capacity is dismissed as "just guessing."

When I was a kid, we regarded U.S. intelligence agencies with fear. The acronym "CIA" was the stuff of which paranoia was made. Today, the intelligence agencies have been completely defanged by a president whose grasp on reality is at the very least in serious question, thus putting our safety and our entire relationship with the world in the hands of an apocalyptic lunatic who may very well have just given Israel the green light to do our dirty work for us.