NEGROPONTE BLOCKS IRAQ EVALUATION. Considering that the United States is fighting a major war in Iraq, it's a bit curious that it hasn't been the subject of a National Intelligence Estimate since 2004. Ken Silverstein reports "that some senior figures at the CIA, along with a number of Iraq analysts, have been pushing to produce a new NIE." What's the problem? "They've been stonewalled, however, by John Negroponte, the administration's Director of National Intelligence, who knows that any honest take on the situation would produce an NIE even more pessimistic than the 2004 version."
Of course, the intelligence community's full of al-Qaeda moles, as Rep. Peter Hoekstra's been telling us without evidence, so there would hardly be any point in doing an NIE anyway.
--Matthew Yglesias
