Counterterrorism Blog

The "New York Times" report on the the most recent National Intelligence Estimate, completed in April, is quickly fueling another ugly political argument over the value and accuracy of the intelligence in the report and whether the news story fairly represents the entire report. The NYT story reported that "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." Senior Democrats rushed to issue statements claiming the report "should put the final nail in the coffin for President Bush's phony argument about the Iraq war" and have injected the issue into the midterm Congressional elections. The White House countered that the NYT account is "not representative of the complete document."

The claim in the NY report would echo judgments of some of our Contributing Experts, notably Evan Kohlmann as early in May 2005, that the Iraq war has been an "engine of international terrorism." But it's also true the NIEs have certainly included some major blunders. The 1997 NIE, the last one before the 9/11 attacks on global terrorism, mentioned bin Laden in only three sentences as a "terrorist financier" and didn't reference al-Qaeda at all. And of course, it was the October 2002 NIE which was a significant factor in the decision to use force against Iraq by famously asserting, "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

SO FOR GOD'S SAKE, let's not turn this NIE into another partisan political battle over intelligence. The American people deserve to know, to the maximum extent possible, the actual findings and conclusions in this NIE and not depend on partial reports and leaks, which could be driven by all sorts of hidden agendas. The White House and DNI Negroponte should ask the members of the 9/11 Commission to independently review the NIE and release an unclassified version or summary of the report as soon as possible.