Personal Intelligence Agency Alert

The link to the explanation of the PIA alert is here. This one gives me no pleasure, as Andrew Sullivan has long been one of my daily reads. But intellectual honesty compels us to be consistent. Andrew triggered the PIA alert today with this post that ended with a reference to Iran:

Dabbling in Holocaust denial by a current government should be treated as a form of insanity or fascism, rather than as some kind of thing to be "understood". Those who are addicted to the narcotic of religious fanaticism do not need enabling or excuses. They need an intervention. Especially when they are on the verge of wielding nuclear weapons.

We know the U.S. intelligence community's current estimate is that Iran is about a decade away from the ability to produce a nuclear weapon; read about that here. Thus, unless Andrew's definition of "on the verge" is a decade, he appears to have his own Personal Intelligence Agency, the information from which has caused him to reach a radically different conclusion than the vast and well-funded U.S. intelligence community that includes the CIA, DIA and NSA.

If we're to say we learned anything from the WMD debacle in Iraq, it's imperative that we avoid reaching the "truth" through repetition of unfounded and lazy speculation this time around.