Posted by Mark Silva at 12:25 pm and updated at 4:32 pm CDT
Attempting to confront criticism that the war in Iraq has made the world more dangerous by recruiting and training a new generation of terrorists, President Bush today ordered a public release of a summary of a classified National Intelligence Estimate that was made of the war against terrorism in April.
At the same time, Bush angrily complained of a leak that released a select finding of the NIE to newspapers over the weekend.
The White House, maintaining that the full nine-page summary of “key judgements” of government intelligence agencies supports the president’s public contentions that U.S. efforts in combatting terrorism have succeeded in “dispersing” and weakening terrorist organizations, complains that the leaked information provides only a limited and distorted view of the war – timed, Bush suggested today, for a calculated impact in the home-stretch of congressional election contests.
“You know, what’s interesting about the NIE, it was an intelligence report done last April,” Bush told reporters at the White House. “As I understand, the conclusions… the evidence on the conclusions reached was — stopped being gathered on February — in the end of February. And here we are, coming down the stretch of an election campaign, and it’s on the front page of your newspaper. Isn’t that interesting? Somebody’s taken it upon themselves to leak classified information for political purposes.”
The NIE, the collective assessment of 16 federal intelligence agencies, is entitled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States.” According to sources who told The New York Times and Washington Post about elements of the report, the NIE concludes that the war in Iraq has worsened the problem of terrorism by spawning a new generation of Islamic radicals.
Yet the White House maintains that this element of the report was “wildly taken out of context” – amoung to just one paragraph of a nine-page executive summary of the NIE, according to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.
“Once again,” Bush said angrily, “there’s a leak out of our government, coming right down the stretch in this campaign, you know, to create confusion in the minds of the American people. In my judgment, it’s why they leaked it…. You can read it for yourself. We’ll stop all the speculation, all the politics about somebody saying something about Iraq, you know, somebody trying to confuse the American people about the nature of this enemy… Everybody can draw their own conclusions about what the report says.”
The White House has ordered Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte to release a summary of the report, once sensitive information about methods or sources is redacted. Bush voiced confidence today that a more complete picture of the NIE will support his contention that the U.S. has made significant gains against terrorism.
“Some people have, you know, guessed what’s in the report and have concluded that going into Iraq was a mistake,” Bush said at a brief White House press conference today with Afgan President Hamid Karzai. “I strongly disagree. I think it’s naive. I think it’s a mistake for people to believe that going on the offense against people that want to do harm to the American people makes us less safe.”
The full report, Bush said, supports what he has been saying for some time: “Because of our successes against the leadership of al Qaeda, the enemy is becoming more diffuse and independent. I’m not surprised the enemy is exploiting the situation in Iraq and using it as a propaganda tool to try to recruit more people to their murderous ways.
“The terrorists fight us in Iraq for a reason. They want to try to stop a young democracy from developing, just like they’re trying to fight this young democracy in Afghanistan. And they use it as a recruitment tool because they understand the stakes. They understand what will happen to them when we defeat them in Iraq.
“You know, to suggest that if we weren’t in Iraq we would see a rosier scenario with fewer extremists joining the radical movement requires us to ignore 20 years of experience,” Bush said. “We weren’t in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th…. We weren’t in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. We weren’t in Iraq when they bombed the (USS) Cole. We weren’t in Iraq when they blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. My judgment is, if we weren’t in Iraq, they’d find some other excuse because they have ambitions…. They’ve used all kinds of excuses.”
