According to Gareth Porter, the intelligence agencies and Dick Cheney’s office have wrestled to a tie on Iran:
The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear program. The aim is to make the document more supportive of Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts provided by participants in the NIE process to two former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers.
But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the “unsatisfactory” draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.
For your enjoyment, here are the conclusions of the two government “investigations” of whether the Bush administration pressured the intelligence agencies on Iraq. First, the Senate Intelligence Committee:
The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
And the WMD Commission:
The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community’s pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs.
Look for the reports on how there was no pressure re Iran in early 2011.
EARLIER: How George Bush’s speeches on Iran reveal this ongoing subterranean battle within the government.