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As a historian of US foreign relations, I can honestly say that that has never been anything like this before: a President openly expressing not just disagreement, but contempt for his own intelligence community because they will not parrot his lies. Just astonishing.
As a scholar, I have been bitterly critical of US covert operations in many parts of the world, but the intelligence community since 2003 has put in place safeguards to make sure that its products reflect much higher standards, in part by having historians train incoming analysts
One of my former mentors, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, was the first historian hired by the Director of National Intelligence to train incoming analysts as you would undergraduate historians in a survey class. It worked. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s ...
Nuclear Program undercut Bush Admin efforts, led by Bolton, to hype danger from Iran and may have prevented a war. Trump’s intelligence officials are an impossible situation, producing analysis for a boss who publicly tells them he doesn’t care what they say. They should resign.
The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran stopped Bush’s campaign of escalation in its tracks. It pissed off the pro-war community so much that think tanks like Heritage called for investigations: heritage.org/middle-east/re…. Now the President himself is leading the charge.
