Declassifying the NIE gains some momentum

September 26, 2006

The recent leaks about the National Intelligence Estimate set up a straightforward scenario: news reports said the NIE offers proof that the war in Iraq is making terrorism worse; the Bush administration said the NIE was being taken out of context. Fine, critics said; declassify the NIE (with appropriate redactions) and let’s see the facts.

Yesterday, this tack drew some bi-partisan support.

The top Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee called on Monday for the White House to declassify the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism that was produced in April. […]

Senators Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is committee chairman, and John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat, said the report should be released to improve understanding of the terrorism threat that the United States faces.

“I think the administration should declassify this document so the American people can see the material for themselves and come to their own conclusions,” Mr. Roberts said in a statement.

Other Republicans, including Sens. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and George Voinovich of Ohio, said they’re considering a similar request.

The Bush White House, of course, is balking, saying that declassification would help terrorists. “What we don’t want to do is tell them what we know so they know how to operate around that,” Frances Townsend, the White House domestic security adviser, said in an interview on CNN. “The leaking of classified documents is always very dangerous, and it’s particularly dangerous in this case.”

Then what about the last time(s) the Bush gang declassified the NIE?

As Josh Marshall noted:

It’s not at all uncommon for a declassified version of an NIE to be released to the public. Just go back to October 2002. The Iraq WMD NIE was provided to the senate intel committee on October 1st. A declassified summary was released to the public on October 5th. And still more of the NIE was released on October 9th.

There’s another dimension to that episode as well. As became clear a year later, in the declassification process, the White House made certain that most of the qualifications and questions about Iraq WMD were removed. So the public version of the NIE seemed far more powerful than the actual classified version. It was another effort to trick the public and it prevented senators who’d seen the report from discussing those parts of the report the White House had kept behind the veil of classification.

That’s well worth keeping in mind in this case since I understand there’s already been some earlier fiddling with this one.

That “fiddling” matters a great deal. One reason Republican lawmakers — particularly a notorious hack like Pat Roberts — may support declassification is because they believe a White House-released version of the NIE might actually bolster the GOP line. They very well may be right — as Josh noted, “[I]t’s hard to believe that the report is really a full exploration of the fiasco the administration has made of Iraq.”

Regardless, it’s worth getting the whole story. The first step is getting a declassified version of the NIE. Stay tuned.

I’m worried about those redactions. Only a fool would trust the Bush administrtion not to redact anything and everything embarrassing, even if all that’s left are “a”, “and”, and “the”.

  • “news reports said the NIE offers proof that the war in Iraq is making terrorism worse”

    Then news reports would be wrong. The NIE would offer assessments of the Intelligence Community that the war in Iraq is helping Jihadist recruiting. There is not going to be any ‘proof’ because by the time intelligence gets up to a NIE, it is so filtered and analyzed that ‘proof’ does not exist.

    Now, you may take the consensus opinion of the Intelligence Community as ‘proof’, but really it’s not. What it is certainly is evidence that the Bushites are not telling the American people the truth about whether the invasion of Iraq has made them or the world safer.

  • Either way, a document that supposedly cast doubt on the administrations tactics, will never see the light of election day.

    Look for it on a Friday in late November.

  • By not releasing it, they are opening themselves up to “What are they trying to hide?” More so, even with Republican requests for release. So we should be happier it’s the way it is.

  • Someone has the un-redacted version and even if it does not come to light today there will be a time and place where the released version and the whole version are compared. This will happen for all of the Bush 43 era documents over time. I for one assume we will find out that Bush was the most corrupt and worst President ever. Rove may be getting desperate but that is a big risk. Eventually the light of day will be shone upon this administration and there will be bugs scurrying all over the place.

  • A year from now, or five or twenty, someone outside the administration will get a chance to compare the real NIE to the public, redacted version. They’ll find that while the redacted one was ambiguous, the real one was actually quite a bit harsher in its judgments. There will be shock, disbelief, outrage among the six people who know or care at that point.

  • “The leaking of classified documents is always very dangerous, and it’s particularly dangerous in this case.”

    Of course it’s particularly dangerous, since it disproves everything those fucking moronic assholes have been saying for the past five years.

  • I smell a rat. Is it possible that the complete NIE is, overall, an endorsement of the Bush admins policy in Iraq? Could they have authorized the “leak” of a part of it that, when taken out of context, appears to condemning just to bait the Dems into making a big fuss about it? Of course, Bush & Co. could play this to the hilt by initially refusing to declassify the report while letting the controversy build. Then, all they’d have to do is release it to make the dems look like the conspiring fools that Rove portrays them as.

  • ‘earthtones’ beat me to the punch. I agree completely that this is all choreographed and we’re dancing our part perfectly. It’ll be released – or something purporting to be the NIE will be released – and it’ll wind up taking the wind from Dem sails just in time for the elections.

    Where are the furious calls for leak investigations on this? I smell orchestration.

  • earthtones AND Eeyore beat me to the punch. This could be Rove’s October Surprise. I have immense confidence in Pat Roberts that he won’t declassify anything UNLESS the NIE is literally titled:

    ‘NIE 2006 – Stay the Course: A case for fightin’ ’em over there’
    – By John ‘DeathSquad’ Negroponte

  • We will see if it is a hack job – just over the wires = MSNBC Breaking News: Bush says U.S. to declassify National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.

  • Given that Pat Roberts is one of the most hactacular senators out there, I can only assume that the declassified portions of the NIE will be distorted beyond recognition.

  • They’re going to release the bits that don’t “compromise security,” This of course means the bits that don’t compromise Shrubya’s job security. This in turn means shagrash has nailed it.

  • The fact that W came out this morning and said that a declassified version of the NIE will be released as soon as possible should have us all worried. The declassified version of the Iraq NIE in October 2002 was a political bastardization of the actual assessment in the classified version. I can only imagine how sanitized the declassified version of this NIE is going to be; it could turn into a political advantage for these incompetent hacks who are making us less safe; undermining our democrtic values, liberties, and traditions; and destoying our reputation and moral standing among the community of nations. I don’t trust this declassified version to contain anywhere near the substance and findings of what’s actually in the NIE.

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