By David E. Sanger The New York Times Saturday, February 19, 2005
WASHINGTON Few officials in the Bush administration better understand the damage that can be wreaked by faulty or politicized intelligence than John Negroponte.
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President George W. Bush selected Negroponte as the first U.S. director of national intelligence Thursday after a prolonged search during which several others turned down the job, turning to a career foreign service officer who is now the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
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Negroponte first saw the effects of erroneous assessments of the enemy as a young foreign service officer in Vietnam. As U.S. ambassador to the United Nations before the war in Iraq, he held the unenviable job of selling the invasion on the basis of a classified National Intelligence Estimate that detailed Saddam Hussein's pursuit and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, an estimate that turned out to be almost all wrong.
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"Two examples," said Richard Holbrooke, his roommate in Vietnam and his predecessor at the United Nations, "where the only intelligence was bad."
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/02/18/news/intel.html