Your first para is a pretty fair assessment. There wasn’t unanimous agreement in the intel community (I’ll leave it to admin opponents to hunt down quotes, though). Like NC Jim says, the (Clinton-appointed, Bush-retained) DCI did call the case for war a ‘slam dunk’, so it’s not like the admin just made the idea up. Likewise, while the intelligence agencies have a very difficult and perforce very secretive job, and many of their successes may be kept hidden, they’ve had several failures in this area: the Indian nuclear test in 1998; the extent of Saddam’s WMD program in 1991 was a surprise as well. So the intel community is not infallible here.
Also, you don’t know what’s in the full NIE, because it hasn’t been released. In fact, no quotes from it appear in either of the stories you link – just quotes from anonymous government sources who say they’ve read it. Better information is good, so long as it does not compromise security; and I would expect that quite a lot of stuff gets classified that doesn’t need to be. So by all means, let’s make more stuff public. But don’t pretend that what’s been printed in your two articles is anything but a thinly-sourced hit job.
