The Left's 2007 NIE Report Politically Motivated

Unsurprisingly, the NIE report that came out in 2007 and was relied upon and singled out by the Left, including Barack Obama, as a reason to drop the "stick" against Iran, appears to have been written to mislead the U.S. and the Bush Administration. The issue surrounds the recently announced second nuclear site in Qom. According to the WSJ:

But the more telling detail, as a recent White House "guidance paper" acknowledges, is that the U.S. has been "carefully observing and analyzing this facility for several years." That timeline is significant, because it was less than two years ago, in December 2007, that a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear programs asserted with "high confidence" that Tehran had "halted its nuclear weapons program" in the fall of 2003.

The NIE was a political sensation, seized on by Democrats and Iraq war critics as another case in which the Bush Administration had supposedly politicized intelligence. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the NIE a "declaration of victory," and it derailed any hopes for the Bush Administration to garner international support for tougher sanctions on Iran.

...Fast forward to the present, and it turns out the NIE was misleading even on its own terms: Iran did have a covert facility, perhaps for enrichment, and the intelligence community knew or at least strongly suspected it. We are also learning that the NIE's judgment puts the U.S. intelligence community at odds with its counterparts in Britain, Germany and Israel, which have evidence to show that Iran resumed its weaponization work after 2003.

...The 2007 NIE also contradicts the findings of the usually hypercautious IAEA, which concluded in a recent analysis that Iran "has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device." The word "implosion" is especially significant because it means Iran is likely seeking to design a warhead compact enough to be fitted atop one of its increasingly capable ballistic missiles.

It's also unsurprising that Obama relied on this report specifically to put forward his Iran diplomacy strategy. Will he revised his view now that he knows the NIE report was a bunch of garbage?