U.S. lawmakers aren’t done cataloguing the nation’s intelligence fiascoes on Iraq. Yet already they seem to be forging ahead with similar blunders on Iran.

Exhibit A is a just-released “staff report” from the House Intelligence Committee’s policy subcommittee purporting to be a bipartisan guide on “Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat.”

The report correctly urges more attention to intelligence gathering.

But the 29-page document is largely a compendium of exaggerations, scare talk and written sleight-of-hand intended to focus narrowly on Iran’s threat, rather than on the uncertainties or opportunities to delay Iran’s drive for the bomb.

Committee spokesman Jamal Ware says the report “was designed as a product to coalesce information in one place for the American people to enable them to reach their own conclusions.”

Calling it “literally, truly a bipartisan” effort, Ware said the Republican chairman and the ranking Democratic member of the subcommittee worked on it jointly.

Yet the report was written by just three staff members — two Republicans and one Democrat. And Ware didn’t dispute that the Republican staffer who put most of the words on paper was Frederick Fleitz.

From 2001 to last year, Fleitz served as a CIA liaison in John Bolton’s State Department office — and Bolton’s back channel to the CIA as Bolton tried to gin up State Department reporting on weapons threats.

Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that the House report seems far more alarmist than some of the public sources from which it supposedly draws.

(Access the report via this Web link: intelligence.house.gov/Releases.aspx?A=76)

The report, for instance, quotes Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte saying Iran could have a bomb “sometime between the beginning of the next decade and the middle of the next decade.”

Yet a full transcript of the June 2 BBC interview from which the quote is drawn shows that Negroponte prefaces that with, “We don’t have clear-cut knowledge,” and adds that the time frame is just an estimate of when Iran “might be in a position to have a nuclear weapon.”

The report says Iran already has produced enough uranium hexafluoride for 12 bombs — citing a Reuters news story rather than intelligence assessments. It fails to add that there is no evidence that Iran has yet acquired the uranium-enrichment infrastructure to produce such a quantity of nuclear bomb fuel.

At the outset, the report states its conclusion that “Iran is seeking nuclear weapons.” The possibility of a “denial and deception” campaign is left to page 13.

The U.S. intelligence community’s own most recent unclassified assessment to Congress on weapons capabilities, for 2004, is far more cautious.

That 2004 weapons report — released publicly this year only after The Plain Dealer questioned its continued classification — says only that, “We remain concerned that Tehran may have a clandestine nuclear weapons program.”

Negroponte himself pulled no punches about Tehran’s drive for the bomb in recent congressional testimony. “We assess that Iran seeks nuclear weapons,” he told the Senate Intelligence Committee in February.

Yet Negroponte quickly added that, “We judge that Tehran probably does not have a nuclear weapon and probably has not yet produced or acquired the necessary fissile material.”

The U.S. intelligence czar also put Iran’s provocations against Iraq in a regional context that dictates restraint, because of Tehran’s desire not to mar its influence with Iraqi Shiites or push its neighbor into a full-blown civil war that could blow back over Iran’s borders.

The staff report quotes this observation — under the headline, “How Iran is Destabilizing Iraq.”

Sullivan is The Plain Dealer’s foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages.

© 2006 The Cleveland Plain Dealer

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