Looking back at the run up to the Iraq war, it's now evident that NIEs, instead of informing policy makers, have themselves become policy making instruments used to advance existing agenda. Put another way, this adminstration has always been able to cook the books with respect to NIEs.

So why, you might wonder, the apparent embarrassing mess up with
this latest NIE? Are we to believe that this NIE somehow "slipped" into
becoming declassified?

Time columnist Robert Baer (a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, and author of See No Eviis) writes "there is also no doubt that the Bush White House was behind this NIE [1]." He argues there's basically no way for an NIE to become declassified this way if it were not supported by the president.

-Babak