It seems pretty odd to me that with all the divining of entrails and reading of tea leaves around the NIE and its bowdlerized public release, SOMEBODY would have noticed the political subtext.
Anybody notice there's an election coming up?
Two years ago, the intelligence community made several pretty obvious moves to discredit the Bush Administration in the lead-up to the 2004 election. They're doing it again now--they're pissed at how they've been discredited by the Administration's twisting, falsification and cherry-picking of intelligence, at the outing of Valerie Plame, and at the wholesale discrediting of their entire community in the name of the idiot policies of Boy King George.
More below.
Remember that the whole Plame outing fiasco was thrown to a slow-burning investigation that effectively removed it from public discussion until well after the election? Remember that the August PDB on Bin Laden, the controversy over Colin Powell's sixteen words and the Niger/aluminum tubes claims were effectively squelched until after the election? Remember that the White House's ENTIRE STRATEGY for avoiding these issues and its own dishonesty, culpability and incompetence boiled down to "blame the CIA"?
I don't believe it's an accident that the NIE leaked now, riveting attention back on the failed Iraq policy, forcing the hand of the White House to release its own, not-very-credible version and to keep talking about a subject it doesn't want to talk about in October. I don't believe it's an accident that a second NIE on Iraq is now rising to the surface.
I think the intelligence community has had enough--had HAD enough years ago--and is doing what it can to undermine the idiots at the helm. They'll get no complaint from most career military, other than Rummy's little cadre of four-star performing monkeys. If there is anyone on earth the Bush boys have managed to piss off more than the Islamic world, it's probably the US intelligence community.
I think we're going to be seeing more of this. And I'm loving it. Give 'em hell, spooks.