This doesn't happen very often, but I think Ezra seriously misreads this WSJ article on the process behind the Iran NIE, from which he extrapolates that "the career intelligence experts in the government recaptured some degree of autonomy and insulation in recent years." The victory of reality-based analysis over blind ideological interpretation with the NIE is significant, but the very shock it engendered from government officials and pundits alike shows just how perverted the intelligence process has become -- and continues to be -- under the current administration. The reason the Iran NIE told the truth was not because of some recent takeover of upstanding individuals over the poisoned intel process, but because, as the article states plainly, "Hundreds of officials were involved and thousands of documents were drawn upon in this report, according to the DNI, making it impossible for any official to overly sway it."
Again: "making it impossible for any official to overly sway it." So sure, for conclusions that have hundreds of officials and thousands of documents, perhaps the administration has a more difficult time obscuring veracity. But that kind of product is extraordinarily rare, and the vast majority of intelligence reports -- nearly all of which are never made public, even in drastically summarized forms like the NIE -- can be easily altered by a single ideology-based supervisor. And there are tons of them. I'm not necessarily a neutral observer of this kind of thing, having had my analysis improperly adjusted constantly while in Baghdad and at the Pentagon as an intelligence officer for DoD, and further having written a book about the continuing problems of the intelligence community. It's extremely worrisome, though, that after years of problematic intel processes, ignoring the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, and virtually no congressional oversight, a single report from overwhelming evidence would be held up as a symbol of sudden, miraculous, and comprehensive self-correction by the intelligence community.
Ezra notes "how frustrated" some administration officials are "with their recent inability to exert iron-fisted control over our agencies," but isn't the fact that these people are so angry over a single, overwhelmingly sourced, objective piece of analysis a sign of near-total perversion of the process in the past several years, rather than a sign of sensational self-correction?--AJ Rossmiller