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.”
Right now, according to front-page items from the New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times, the NIE makes one thing abundantly clear: the war in Iraq is making the threat of terrorism worse, not better.
A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April … asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe. An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology. The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.
As if the rest of reality hadn’t made the results obvious enough, the NIE should seal the deal. The Bush gang, on top of all of their own tragic mistakes, launched a war under false pretenses, against an enemy that was not an immediate threat, and has made the terrorist threat around the world considerably worse. Casting Bush in the role of the “Manchurian Candidate” is looking increasingly plausible.
The consequences of the NIE’s conclusions are dramatic.
For one thing, there’s the bureaucratic context to consider. Two years ago, the CIA produced an NIE for the administration on Iraq, but it was spiked — the document didn’t toe the party line and emphasized inconvenient realities. The intelligence community prepared a new NIE on the current state of Iraq several months ago, but as Harper’s [tag]Ken Silverstein[/tag] noted, it met considerable political resistance from those who believed ignorance was preferable to facts.
As Matthew Yglesias put it, “[F]or months and months the administration has reacted to the report not by trying to improve its policies, but rather by covering up the NIE. Same sorry old story, but it’s an absolute disaster for the country.”
There’s also campaign politics to consider. Glenn Greenwald argued that Dems could simply take the straight newspaper account of the NIE and “air it over and over and over every single day as much as possible until November 7.” Digby notes how effective this would be: “Bush’s Iraq adventure has put this country in much more danger than it was and for no good reason. If people believe terrorism is a serious threat, then these Republicans are the last people they should trust.”
And what does the Bush White House have to say about the new NIE? Congressional Democrats went on a tear yesterday in response to the news, but the administration has a defense:
Sunday’s newspaper articles on the National Intelligence Estimate — by the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times — were “not representative of the complete document,” the White House said. That assessment was echoed by National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte, whose office prepared the report.
Fair enough. The newspapers didn’t see the entire NIE, so we don’t know the whole story. Of course, there’s one easy way to fix that.
Call up your representative and senators — Republican or Democrat, it doesn’t matter — and tell them you want the April National Intelligence Estimate (“Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States”) released to the public. Now. Before the election. So the public can know what the White House has been keeping from them.
The administration has intentionally tried to cover up the definitive intelligence report on the war in Iraq, apparently because it notes what a tragic failure the war has been in reducing the threat of terrorism. Bush launched a “major public relations offensive,” insisting that the war is making us safer, while the NIE has sat on his desk highlight just how wrong his statements have been. As Josh Marshall put it, “That’s a cover-up in every meaningful sense of the word, a calculated effort to hide information from and deceive the public. And it’s actually a replay of what happened in late 2002, when the White House kept the Iraq WMD NIE’s doubts about Iraqi weapons programs away from the public.”
We’re taking the NIE out of context? The rest of the report offers a more complete picture? Terrific, let’s declassify it — Bush and Cheney love declassifying favorable intelligence all the time — and see who’s right.