Another Intelligence Crap, er, Coup

According to the New York Times today,

A commission due to report to President Bush this month will describe American intelligence on Iran as inadequate to allow firm judgments about Iran's weapons programs, according to people who have been briefed on the panel's work.

You know what this means, of course. We'd better attack Iran, just in case! Further on, the piece says,

One person who described the panel's deliberations and conclusions characterized American intelligence on Iran as "scandalous," given the importance and relative openness of the country, compared with such an extreme case as North Korea.

Apparently, being completely wrong on WMD in Iraq--George Tenet's "slam dunk"--doesn't rate "scandalous" and I don't believe that this is an unconscious omission in the first page of this article. Keeping in mind the complicity of the New York Times in general, and Judith Miller in particular in the runup to war in Iraq, I have this bad feeling that we're seeing another piece put carefully in place for the June Iran campaign.

In a television interview in February on Fox News, Vice President Dick Cheney described the work of the commission as "one of the most important things that's going forward today."

Now Cheney, who has a habit of believing only that which aligns with his ideology, thinks the report is "important" because it gives plenty of wiggle room to argue for attack on Iran. On the one hand, if the agency reports that there is not sufficient evidence of the claims used for war, Cheney will cite the report as proof of the agency's incompetence. If, on the other hand, houseboy Porter Goss performs as expected, the CIA will support invasion through some cooked up crap ("It may look like a popcorn popper, but we are certain of its use in triggering nuclear devices.")

It is only in the third paragraph from the end of the story, immediately following the Cheney quote, that we get this reminder:

In the case of Iraq, a National Intelligence Estimate completed in October 2002 was among the assessments that expressed certainty that Baghdad possessed chemical and biological weapons and was rebuilding its nuclear program. Those assessments were wrong, and a report last year by the chief American weapons inspector found that Iraq had destroyed what remained of its illicit arsenal nearly a decade before the United States invasion.

In spite of this, and if the CIA supports a move for attack on Iran, we can trust them because

At the Central Intelligence Agency, senior officials have defended the assessments, but they have also imposed new guidelines intended to reduce the prospect for failures.

Yes, those new guidelines are sure to have fixed all the problems, both of actual intelligence collection, and then presenting it in unbiased form. With Goss running the show, Negroponte between him and Bush, Rumsfeld having neutered opposition in the Pentagon, and Cheney running over to Langley to bludgeon the analysts into submission, they'll have all the reason they need for bombs over Tehran.