John Bolton, writing in today’s WaPo on the new Iran NIE:
[T]he NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.
It recalls such “hot tidbits” as those aluminum tubes, Curveball, and Niger yellowcake.
