As Slate’s Fred Kaplan explained a while back, a [tag]National Intelligence Estimate[/tag] ([tag]NIE[/tag]) “is not an ordinary report. It marks the one occasion when the Central Intelligence Agency warrants its name, acting as a central entity that pulls together the assessments of all the myriad intelligence departments, noting where they agree and where they differ.”
The last time we heard about the NIE, portions of the document had been leaked, and purported to show that the war in Iraq is making the threat of terrorism worse, not better. At that point, an NIE specific to the war in Iraq was kept hidden by intelligence czar John Negroponte, apparently for fear that it would further hurt Republicans in the 2006 midterm elections.
Several senators demanded that the administration prepare a new NIE on the war in Iraq and present the findings during a closed-door session of the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. As Harper’s Ken Silverstein noted, it didn’t go well.
This committee expected to be briefed on the long-awaited NIE by an official from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which coordinates NIEs by gathering input from all of the nation’s various intelligence agencies. But the NIC official turned up empty-handed and told the committee that the intelligence community hadn’t been able to complete the NIE because it had been dealing with the many demands placed upon it by the Bush Administration to help prepare the new military strategy on Iraq. He then said that not all of the relevant agencies had contributed to the NIE, which has made it impossible to put together a finished product.
Silverstein describe this as the “dog ate my homework” alibi. That’s putting it mildly.
Consider the administration’s circular reasoning.
They want to escalate the war in Iraq … which requires them to get better intelligence … which they can’t put together because they’re busy escalating the war in Iraq. It’s enough to make me want to pull what’s left of my hair out.
Talk about reckless irresponsibility, shouldn’t the war policy be based on the new National Intelligence Estimate? BarbinMD described the Bush gang’s process as putting the “escalation cart before the NIE horse.”
As for the Senate:
[T]hose in attendance now believe that senior intelligence officials are stalling because an NIE will be bleak enough to present a significant political liability. Given the Bush Administration’s “surge” policy and the extraordinary danger faced by U.S. troops in Iraq (27 U.S. servicemembers died there this weekend), the need for a new NIE is urgent. The intelligence community is doing the nation a disservice by making Congress wait for the truth.
And they’re doing a disservice to the troops by sending them into a civil war without having an NIE already in place.