Mark Mazetti in the NY Times reports that "Some senior Bush administration officials and top Republican lawmakers" are anxious to get into another war - this time with Iran - and they are frustrated that the intelligence agencies are just not providing them with sufficient justification, dammit!. So the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by GOP hard-righter Peter Hoekstra, has issued a report complaining about the spy agencies' "cautious assessments about Iran’s weapons programs."
Mazetti writes: The complaints, expressed privately in recent weeks… echo the tensions that divided the administration and the Central Intelligence Agency during the prelude to the war in Iraq.
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The House Intelligence Committee report released Wednesday was written primarily by Republican staff members on the committee, and privately some Democrats criticized the report for using innuendo and unsubstantiated assertions to inflate the threat that Iran posed to the United States.
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Some veterans of the intelligence battles that preceded the Iraq war see the debate as familiar and are critical of efforts to create hard links based on murky intelligence.update:
Matthew Yglesias guesting at TPM has read the report and taken notice of the "missile range graphic" - which "shows the missiles being fired from Kuwait rather than, say, Iran" and "that the outer circles describes the range of a missile that doesn't exist."
Laura Rozen guesting for Kevin Drum observes the launch of "the marketing campaign against Iran."
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