And where should our confidence be?

Exactly when are we the people, the president and the congress supposed to believe the National Intelligence Estimate. Is it the 2005 report which tried to take all eyes off Iraq, or the 2007 report which appears when interest in the mideast is flagging as an election approaches? Pardon me if I find the media salivation and hysteria about this a bit transparent.

In 2005, the authors of the report "assess[ed] with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that Iran is immovable."

In 2007, they "judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program. Judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years. . . . Assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." Excerpt from Taranto

Does anyone have confidence that the WMD intelligence reports we heard about all during the Clinton years (including the inspections), or the Iran threat we've been hearing about and seeing results of in Iraq are in any way accurate? Well, if you are a Democrat, you discount all WMD reports even if your own Senators (Clinton, Edwards, Kerry, Kennedy, et al) preached and warned about it; if you are a Republican, you seem to hang an awful lot of our security and freedoms on agencies with very little accountability when it suits your purpose and ignore them when they don't. Hmmm. Two peas in a pod, innit?

Update: "The Wall Street Journal http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010946 reports in an editorial that "the NIE's main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as 'hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials,' according to an intelligence source." So it could be that when the media and Democratic politicians treat the NIE as a political document, that is exactly what its authors intended. " Best of the Web, Dec. 5, 2007