In case you've not yet seen it, here's a link to Gareth Porter's piece on Vice President Cheney's increasingly successful efforts to tailor a National Intelligence Estimate.
...Part of Cheney's strategy was to keep sending the draft back for further work while he was creating a new political atmosphere on Iran's role in Iraq. He began in early 2007 to use the U.S. military command in Iraq to wage an intensive propaganda campaign on how the Iranians were supplying EFPs to anti-U.S. Shiite guerrillas through the Quds force. Ignoring intelligence available to the military that EFPs were being manufactured in machine shops in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus and his subordinates formulated a new narrative that would dominate media coverage and political discourse on the issue of Iran and Iraq.
The pressure on intelligence analysts to produce "evidence" sufficient to justify military action has been intense -- to the extent that "the analysts ready to go along with the new narrative are now the majority."
Nevertheless, some intelligence analysts on Iran are reportedly still refusing to say that there is concrete evidence to support the official line that the Iranian regime is exporting EFPs to Iraq. They are insisting on including their dissenting views on the issue in the NIE.
That is why the new Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, under orders from Cheney, has refused to circulate the NIE until all dissenting views on the issue have been removed.
The same kind of pressure is now being applied with respect to assessing nuclear capabilities in Iran.
...The White House ...forced the reexamination of the analysts' judgment on the Iranian nuclear program by holding the NIE hostage. How successful that hardball tactic has been in getting language more acceptable to Cheney is still not known, but there were still differences of view on the issue in the draft NIE as of last month, according to my sources.
These approaches to cooking the intelligence on Iran are even more nefarious than Cheney's direct approach on Iraq in 2002. They will certainly give Cheney language supporting his belligerent policy that he can leak to the press and use to keep Congress in line. Hopefully responsible officials with access to whatever dissenting views remain will leak those to anti-war Democrats, along with more details about how Cheney has manipulated the process.
Given the thumbs-up graciously bestowed by so many Democrats with respect to the recent condemnation of Iran, and given the dead-dog attitude of Congress in general when it comes to guarding the Constitution from White House aggressions, we shouldn't have much confidence that Congress will stop this. Some commentators have suggested the Pentagon is more likely to do so.
