The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran has been delayed for over a year because Dick Cheney doesn’t like the conclusions. To their everlasting credit, the intelligence people have not backed down, and now the White House will release the “unsatisfactory” draft, sans key findings.

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.

[snip]

Cheney’s desire for a “clean” NIE that could be used to support his aggressive policy toward Iran was apparently a major factor in the replacement of John Negroponte as director of national intelligence in early 2007. Negroponte had angered neo-conservatives in the administration by telling the press in April 2006 that the intelligence community believed that it would still be “a number of years off” before Iran would be “likely to have enough fissile material to assemble into or to put into a nuclear weapon, perhaps into the next decade”.

Neo-conservatives immediately attacked Negroponte for the statement, which merely reflected the existing NIE on Iran issued in spring 2005. Robert G Joseph, the under secretary of state for arms control and an ally of Cheney, contradicted Negroponte the following day. He suggested that Iran’s nuclear program was nearing the “point of no return” - an Israeli concept referring to the mastery of industrial-scale uranium enrichment.

After replacing Negroponte with McConnell, they tried to force the intelligence community to reconsider how long it would take for Iran to make a nuclear weapon. The five to ten year estimate just doesn’t generate sufficient alarm. But the pressure didn’t work, so McConnell responded by making it more difficult to declassify the report.

The decision to withhold key judgments on Iran from the public was apparently part of a White House strategy for reducing the potential damage of publishing the estimate with the inclusion of dissenting views.

As of early October, officials involved in the NIE were “throwing their hands up in frustration” over the refusal of the administration to allow the estimate to be released, according to the former intelligence officer. But the Iran NIE is now expected to be circulated within the administration in late November, says Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and founder of the anti-war group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

The release of the Iran NIE will certainly intensify the bureaucratic political struggle over Iran policy. If the NIE includes both dissenting views on key issues, a campaign of selective leaking to news media of language from the NIE that supports Cheney’s line on Iran will soon follow, as well as leaks of the dissenting views by his opponents.

This whole Iran thing is just another giant cock-up designed to make certain people even more filthy rich than they are already while conveniently reducing the world’s population and further impoverishing America’s middle class. This is completely obvious if you are paying minimally close attention. Let’s watch together while the media people, with vast access to the halls of power and secret stores of information, come to totally different conclusions.