One Utah

As The New York Times reported on Sunday, in April the government produced a secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States.” A main conclusion of the NIE was that the Iraq war has been counterproductive in terms of the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT). The war has fueled Islamic radicalism around the globe and has caused the terrorist threat to grow.

NIEs are produced several times a year to address particular national security issues of concern to our nation’s leaders, and are circulated to high-level executive branch officials and selected members of Congress. These documents express the coordinated judgments of the US Intelligence Community made up of 16 intelligence agencies, and represent the most authoritative assessment of the Director of National Intelligence. The newly-revealed document is the first NIE to assess the terrorism threat since the invasion of Iraq, and it has been in preparation since 2004.

The next day, this was front-page news in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Seattle Post-Intelligencer/Seattle Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the San Francisco Chronicle. In Salt Lake City, both the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News soft-pedaled this story. The DN treated it like just another Washington partisan dust-up. In an editorial in today’s edition the Trib says “nobody should be shocked” to learn that the war in Iraq has encouraged jihadists.

Neither paper put the newly-revealed NIE in the context of President Bush’s recent campaign to convince Americans that we are winning the GWOT and that the occupation of Iraq is contributing to that putative success. Nor did they remind readers that the Bush administration manipulated the October 2002 NIE on “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs” to bolster the case for invading Iraq. To quote a recent post by Josh Marshall on Talking Points Memo:

“For the last six weeks and, in fact, the last six months, the White House and the president have been engaged in a coordinated campaign to convince the public that despite the setbacks and mistakes, the war in Iraq is a critical component of fighting the War on Terror. Making that argument is their plan for the next six weeks until the election. All the while, they’ve been sitting on a report that says that’s flat wrong, a lie and that precisely the opposite is the case.

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.”

Today, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) revealed the existence of a second NIE on Iraq – “specifically on Iraq – that has been left in draft form at the National Intelligence Council. That is because some of our leaders don’t want us to see it until after the election,” she says.

It’s going to be up to Congress to force the Bush administration to release unclassified versions of these NIEs as soon as possible before the election, which is only six weeks away. This ought to be easy to do, because NIEs mostly offer broad analysis and conclusions, without a lot of detail about intelligence sources and methods.

UPDATE: Today President Bush ordered the release of a four-page declassified section (PDF) of last April’s terrorism NIE titled “Key Judgments.” From the Associated Press:

“Bush and his top advisers had said the broad assessment on global terrorism supported their arguments that the world is safer. But more than three pages of stark judgments warning about the spread of terrorism contrasted with the administration’s glass-half-full declarations.”

UPDATE: In a conference call with the press, Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend addressed Rep. Harmon’s revelation of a second NIE dealing specifically with the Iraq War:

“My understanding is the planned release date, given the work that must be done to have it be comprehensive and complete, is January of ‘07. But I will tell you, that’s still quicker than most NIEs get done. The timing has got nothing to do with the election.”

UPDATE: One last update to be fair to the Salt Lake Tribune, which did front-page the AP story about the release of part of the NIE and then followed up with a hard-hitting editorial calling for the de-classification of the full document.

This entry was posted Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 1:21 pm and is filed under George W. Bush, National Politics, Republicans, Rumsfeld, War. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.