Sunday, September 24, 2006
The NIE Bombshell
Expect Spin, Lot of Spin
Details of a National Intelligence Estimate prepared in April of this year make a big hole in the Bush Administration's support of the war and occupation of Iraq. "The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded." Bush-Cheney and champions of the misadventure in Iraq must be scrambling to come up with spin -- that is something they are never shy of. Not going to be easy. "Each NIE is reviewed and approved for dissemination by the National Intelligence Board (NIB), which is comprised of the DNI and other senior Intelligence Community leaders within the Intelligence Community."
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Excerpts from the Washington Post: A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the "centrality" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document. "It's a very candid assessment," one intelligence official said yesterday of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the March 2003 invasion. "It's stating the obvious." The NIE, whose contents were first reported by the New York Times, coincides with public statements by senior intelligence officials describing a different kind of conflict than the one outlined by President Bush in a series of recent speeches marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. |
