Intelligence Report fuels Iraq debate

The White House’s release of a dire National Intelligence Estimate on global terrorism has illustrated once again how easy it is to publicly misrepresent intelligence-community findings—especially when almost all of the key documents remained shrouded in secrecy.
Only two days ago, while attempting to knock down stories by The New York Times and other publications about the NIE, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow insisted to reporters that the document’s conclusions were entirely consistent with the public statements of the president and other Bush administration officials.
News reports on the NIE “contain nothing that the president hasn’t said,” Snow told reporters in Riverside, Conn. “Obviously, we’re not going to go into what the classified report does say, but … the substance is precisely what the president has been saying.”
But the actual wording of the NIE contains sobering conclusions that, in tone and substance, are very different from what Bush and other administration officials have recently been saying about the government’s progress in the war on terror.
[Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball - Newsweek, WEB EXCLUSIVE - Sept. 28, 2006]


PRESIDENT BUSH first declared Iraq to be the ``central front" in his war on terror in a nationally televised address in September of 2003, just before the second anniversary of 9/11.
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Despite every rationale for the lengthy war being proven false, the ``central front" declaration remains the centerpiece of propaganda. Bush repeated the ``central front" line two times apiece in fund-raising speeches last week in Orlando and Tampa.
In the Tampa speech, he said, ``Iraq is a central front in this war on terror, and we've got a plan to defeat the enemy."
This rhetoric is a central affront to the American people. His plan is multiplying the enemy.
"The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," a US intelligence official told The New York Times in a story Sunday on a classified National Intelligence Estimate on the terror threat. The estimate represents the consensus conclusions of all 16 US spy agencies.
In its story on the estimate, The Los Angeles Times quoted another intelligence insider as saying, "Things like the Iraq war have given the terrorists recruiting tools and places to ply their trade and a training ground."
The Washington Post's version said the invasion and occupation of Iraq is now the ``leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda." As the White House boasts of incremental victories as individual Al Qaeda leaders are killed, the National Intelligence Estimate says that terror networks are spreading like cancer around the planet.
[By Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe Columnist - September 27, 2006]


You would think that a consensus report from all sixteen U.S. intelligence services concluding that he has blown the war on terror would be a really big deal to the president. But that assumes that George W. Bush values intelligence.
Clearly, he does not. So the news that a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate concludes the threat of terror against the United States has increased since 9/11, largely thanks to his irrational invasion of Iraq, has not disturbed Bush's branded "what me worry" countenance.
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"We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere," reads a section of the National Intelligence Estimate that Bush declassified on Tuesday. "The Iraq conflict has become the 'cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement."
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In the name of defending our security, the Bush Administration has suppressed any intelligence information it could, ignoring the public's right to know, as much as is feasible, what is being done in its name. We must never forget that our system of government is based on the utility of freedom that truth will expose error — and just such an accounting is long overdue.
[Robert Scheer - The Nation - September 28, 2006]


President Bush likes to say he will stay the course in Iraq. The question is: What course?
Is it the course that has so far cost some 2,700 American lives, 100 Iraqi lives a day, and an estimated expenditure of $300 billion so far?
Is it the course, which, according to a leaked consensus estimate of the US intelligence community, has made Iraq a primary recruitment vehicle for the next generation of violent extremists and weakened the global fight against terrorism?
The president has said that Iraq is the central battleground in the war against terrorism. But the intelligence agencies suggest that if this is so, it is only because the war has made it so.
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In public, Bush stands his ground adamantly. But in private, we learn from The Washington Post, he is sometimes given to tears when he meets with a war widow. In one case, a woman met in private with the president and broke into tears as she talked of her two fatherless children. Bush kept repeating, "I am so sorry for your loss." At one point his eyes welled up. But when she pleaded with him to bring the troops home, he said only, "We see things differently."
As of now, he is staying the course.
[Daniel Schorr - Christian Science Monitor - September 29, 2006]


If Iraq is the center of the terrorist front, it's because we made it that. Increasing our efforts will therefore only increase the terror. And make us all the less safe.
As detailed by the NIE created by 16 spy agencies that brief President Bush who called their finding "naïve" based on his knowledge from their briefing him, which he declassified against his better judgment that had declassified another NIE favorable to him, even though it put an agent at risk which is something he says he would never do.
Sometimes, you should leave literature and fantasy to the experts. Because this isn't even a good parody. At least Alice got to leave Wonderland. She was smart enough not to Stay the Course.
[Robert J. Elisberg (Blog), September 28, 2006]