Formal dissent within the US intelligence community?

The New York Sun's Eli Lake reports that four out of sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies have issued a formal dissent to the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.

Lake says these dissenting agencies are objecting to the report's conclusion that Al Qaeda is only playing a small role in the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.

The dissenting agencies are reportedly the Treasury Department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the military intelligence bureaus of the Army and Marines. They oppose the conclusions of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the State Department, and others, according to Lake.

While Lake's sources may very well be right, I myself can't see what the dissenters are allegedly talking about, at least not in the summary of the NIE that has been de-classified.

This de-classified version mentions al Qaeda (actually al-Qa'ida as they prefer to spell it) in two separate paragraphs. First:

Extremists—most notably the Sunni jihadist group al-Qa’ida in Iraq (AQI) and Shia
oppositionist Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) — continue to act as very effective accelerators
for what has become a self-sustaining inter-sectarian struggle between Shia and
Sunnis.

And second:

The Intelligence Community judges that the term “civil war” does not adequately
capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia
violence, al-Qa’ida and Sunni insurgent attacks on Coalition forces, and widespread
criminally motivated violence. Nonetheless, the term “civil war” accurately
describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict, including the hardening of ethno-
sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian
mobilization, and population displacements.

But in any case, Lake says that these formal dissenters contend that Al Qaeda is not just a "very effective accelerator" of the insurgency, as the majority holds, but rather the new authority to whom the Sunnis, including the Baathists, the former regime elements, have conceded authority.

Specifically, this would make the head of the Sunni insurgency Abu Ayoub al-Masri, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq succeeded Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after he was, uh, promoted to Paradise by U.S. forces last June.

Lake seems to believe that in its assessment, the CIA is trying to make the case that, as he puts it, "Iraq is not a central front in the war on Al Qaeda," in order to undermine the President's war strategy.

The dissenting views, he says, are all fairly similar to those of Marine Colonel Peter Devlin, head of Marine intelligence in the Anbar province, the seat of the Sunni insurgency, as expressed in a classified assessment that was revealed by the Washington Post in September.