October 1, 2002: CIA Analyst Thinks NIE on Iraq Dishonest in Relegating Dissent to Footnotes

The National Estimate on Intelligence (NIE) on Iraq (see October 1, 2002 and October 4, 2002) suffers from what CIA case officer and Iraq WMD specialist Valerie Plame Wilson will call “intellectual sloppiness.” In her 2007 book Fair Game, Plame Wilson will write that it was intellectually dishonest for the NIE authors to relegate the deep dissensions and counterarguments over the WMD claims to “footnotes in tiny type at the bottom of the” report. The footnotes are not “adequate pushback when building a case for something as serious as war,” she will write. “The CIA failed to demonstrate convincingly to the administration that there was a serious and sustained debate over this issue.” [Wilson, 2007, pp. 123]