A Worthless NIE

Why have the Democrats seized upon the recently, partially declassified NIE as some kind of 'proof' of anything? Why have the Republicans tried to defend the Tyrant's policies on the basis of the NIE's judgments? And why haven't any commentators noticed anything wrong with this document? In the first place, this is one of the most pathetically written scraps of paper I've ever seen the US bureaucracy produce. If I'd been supervising Negroponte I'd have torn the thing into shreds in his face and sent him back to write up something I could read. From these few pages filled with mind-numbing passive tense constructions, it's impossible to know what the document is trying to say. (In fact, it seems to be trying to not say anything.) The real indication—often the only indication—of an intelligible thought comes when you write it down. If what you write isn't clear, there's no clear thinking behind it. Period. Secondly, if what was declassified is supposed to be some sort of executive summary, one must ask, why hasn't the word Palestine appeared anywhere in it? If the collective judgment of a mega-billion dollar intelligence apparatus regarding Islamic terrorism can't manage to notice that Israel's appalling treatment of the Palestinians is a critical element in our relations with the Islamic world, then one must be skeptical whether this apparatus can produce any intelligence analysis of any value whatsoever.