The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Washington

The US intelligence community came under fire over the weekend on two fronts, as conservatives criticized a recent CIA report on Iran's nuclear program and the Justice Department announced a probe into the agency's destruction of videotapes showing interrogations of terror suspects. The intelligence services are still trying to restore their credibility following the debacle over alleged weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the main justification for the US-led 2003 invasion. After months of increasingly bellicose rhetoric from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney over the threat of Iran's nuclear program, the US intelligence agencies on Monday declared with "high confidence" that Iran halted a secret nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure. The assessment of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) overturned long-held US policy assumptions that Iran is bent on obtaining nuclear weapons, regardless of international demands or sanctions. Democrats in Congress, who said the Bush administration was overstating the Iranian threat, now took a back seat to conservative Republican critics, who said the report understated the Iranian threat. Chief among them was former US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, who wrote in a commentary this week that "the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported."