So says the latest National Intelligence Estimate according to the New York Times. I like Atrios’s headline better: “CIA To Dick Cheney: Suck. On. This.”

This brings up a something that’s concerned me about how Cheney and Bush have manipulated intelligence over these past 7 years. Specifically, it’s hard to avoid looking at this NIE as anything but a political football rather than a real government report. At the very least, this administration has been so clumsy and heavy handed about enforcing ideological orthodoxy in everything from intelligence reports to Fish & Wildlife studies that it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that the departments themselves might rebel.

In other words, do the writers of the NIE feel pressure to make claims less “flexible” to spin? Do they have to exaggerate certainty toward the status quo based on how they know the White House will likely spin the results of their work?

I’m not claiming this happened here. I’m just pointing out how pernicious interference can be. It’s similar to the concerns about torture, for example. Once you go down this road of messing with the nominal independence of agency reports, can you trust what information you get out of them in the future?

Don’t get me wrong. If this assessment is true, and this pulls back the crazies like Joe Lieberman from their all-war-all-the-time footing, then great. As with anything that seems too good to be true, though, I think it’s healthy to be skeptical. I hope the process is uncorrupted enough to produce good estimates.

Update: As always, I should leave stuff like this to the professional bloggers. Kevin Drum rounds up more background, including tying together some of the history here. Apparently, this estimate was held up for almost a year because of this conclusion. See my point above…

Update 2: Kevin Drum makes the money point in his followup:

This NIE was apparently finished a year ago, and its basic parameters were almost certainly common knowledge in the White House well before that. This means that all the leaks, all the World War III stuff, all the blustering about the IAEA — all of it was approved for public consumption after Cheney/Bush/Rice/etc. knew perfectly well it was mostly baseless.

Yes, exactly. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this story is the most important foreign policy revelation right now because it lays bare both the consensus of our intelligence agencies as well as the complete and utter bullshit being fed to us by our elected leaders. Oh, and Joe Lieberman is a bigger fool than previously realized.

Update 3: Kevin Drum stays on this story, passing on this bit from Matthew Yglesias. Drum’s follow on conclusion is actually better, so read both. The money point:

And now we can add to that one more thing: in the aftermath of our lightning victory in Iraq, Iran really was feeling some pressure and was willing to talk to us about halting their bomb program — and possibly cooperating in other areas as well.

…

But like Matt says, the Bushies couldn’t take yes for an answer. So we are where we are.

Again, skepticism is the order of the day. This is one NIE after years of war cheerleaders telling us otherwise. The implications, however, of this NIE being accurate or even mostly accurate as these things go is, well, stunning and outrageous.