re: #123 Kenneth

The 2007 NIE was widely misquoted and widely unread. What the report actually said was that the US intelligence community has a high degree of confidence that from 2003 to 2006 Iran suspended the warhead development phase of their nuclear weapons program. During that period the Iranians continued to work on the other two phases: uranium enrichment & ballistic missile development. After 2006, the confidence level in that assessment dropped to moderate.

In other words, the NIE never said Iran stopped their nuclear weapons program, only that they slowed down one part of it while the concentrated on the other parts.

Still, the folks who disseminated the findings produced a summary that cherry picked the things they wanted to emphasize that implied that Iran had stopped seeking nuclear weapons. That had the desired political effect. True the NIE wasn’t a disaster, it was the way it was presented that was. But most of us will still use the shorthand “NIE” when we really mean the “highly politicized summary of the NIE.”