Just yesterday, the White House heard the bipartisan calls for declassifying the National Intelligence Estimate, and had a firm response: no.
White House officials said Monday that making the information public would only help terrorists gain a better understanding of how much the United States knows of their operations.
“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.”
Less than 24 hours later, the White House has changed its mind.
President Bush on Tuesday said it is naive and a mistake to think that the war with Iraq has worsened terrorism, as a key portion of a national intelligence assessment by his own administration suggests. He said he was declassifying part of the report.
The word “part” kind of stands out, doesn’t it? Specifically, Bush, at a White House news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said “key judgments” of the report will be released “as quickly as possible” so that “everybody can draw their own conclusions about what the report says.”
Still, by releasing at least some of the NIE, Bush is making progress, right? Well, maybe.
First, if Bush is only releasing “part” of the document, it’s likely we’ll only see parts that the White House likes, and even those parts will lack details. There’s already an established precedent — in 2002, the president authorized the release of the NIE on Iraq, but conveniently edited out all of those pesky conclusions that happened to be right.
Second, as Josh Marshall explained today, we’re looking at more than one NIE — there’s one on terrorist threats in general, and another exclusively on Iraq. If Americans are, to borrow the president’s phrase, going to “draw their own conclusions about what the report says,” the White House is going to have to release both. JMM reported that isn’t likely to happen.
Hill sources tell TPMmuckraker that the administration has been sitting on the report, trying to prevent its dissemination before the election, presumably. And it turns out, from what we’ve heard, that this NIE actually hasn’t been given the official “NIE” label because doing that would have required sharing it with various members of Congress.
The President has already said he’s releasing “parts” of the April NIE — which likely means it’ll cleansed of all the important details. But both should be released. The April NIE and this NIE that dare not speak its name too.
And the only way that will happen is with pressure from constituents. Call your representatives and senators. Rep. Harman has noted the existence of the separate Iraq report and called for its release before the election. Find out from your member of Congress whether they want it released to or not.
And, lastly, there’s one more point to keep in mind: these documents, if released fairly, probably won’t be clear “wins” for either side of the political divide. As I understand the NIE, it’s the collective judgment of a vast intelligence bureaucracy, with some agencies and officials sometimes disagreeing with others. Of course, this isn’t about scoring points; it’s about getting facts, and making sound decisions based on those facts.
Given what we know of the Bush White House, none of this is even remotely likely, but it’s hardly an unreasonable goal, right?