Bush claims Intelligence Estimate "niave"

Well, here we go again, Bush is again claiming that you shouldn't believe the intelligence estimate that was put together by the sixteen US government spy agencies. (I had no idea there were sixteen and could not tell you the names of more than three) Here's there modus operandi, you must trust us, our intelligence tells us this that and the other, then later, the intelligence we told you that you should trust us on is crap, don't pay any attention to what we said...

I'll just dive right in to some quotes from the IHT...

President George W. Bush said Tuesday that he had ordered the declassification of key parts of a major intelligence report that reportedly found that the Iraq war has helped produce a new generation of Islamic radicals and increased the threat of terrorism.

The president was clearly unhappy that findings from the document, a National Intelligence Estimate completed in April, had made their way into news reports. The New York Times disclosed some of the details in its Sunday editions.

"Some people have guessed what's in the report and concluded that going into Iraq was a mistake," the president said. "I strongly disagree."

"I think it's naïve. I think it's a mistake for people to believe that going on the offense against people that want to do harm against the American people makes us less safe."



Noting that evidence-gathering for the assessment had concluded in February, and that the report itself had been finished two months later, he said: "Here we are, coming down the homestretch of an election campaign and it's on the front page of your newspapers. Isn't that interesting?"

The president made the announcement during a brief White House news conference alongside a key ally in the terror fight, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.

Saying that people were drawing the wrong conclusion from the leaked news reports, Bush said he had asked John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, to declassify key findings of the assessment, which reflects the consensus of the nation's 16 intelligence agencies.

Bush made it clear that the matter rankled.

"I think it's a bad habit for our government to declassify every time there's a leak," he said, before saying that he had told Negroponte to do so.

"I told the DNI to declassify the document, you can read it for yourself," Bush said. "Everybody can make their own judgments."

It was not immediately clear when the declassified text would be released.

The House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, then asked her colleagues to convene a highly unusual secret session of the full House to discuss the intelligence analysis, which she called "the administration's worst nightmare." But Republicans control the chamber, and rejected the proposal.

No such session has taken place since July 1983, when lawmakers met behind closed doors to discuss U.S. support for paramilitary operations in Nicaragua, according to The Associated Press.

Democrats have seized on reports that the document linked the war in Iraq to a rising terror threat - a potentially damaging blow to the central administration argument that the war has made Americans safer. The Democrats hope to keep voters focused on setbacks in Iraq even as the administration wants them to think about its efforts to fight terrorism.

Several Democrats had called for the declassification.

Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, joined those calls Tuesday. She said that the Iraq war had "made the global jihadist threat more dangerous."

"We created a failed state by removing Saddam Hussein and established a recruiting tool and training ground for global jihadists."

The administration had resisted the declassification. But as the security debate has exploded ahead of the Nov. 7 legislative elections, the pressure to respond to Democrats' furious criticism may have tipped the balance.

In earlier responses, the administration had said that the news reports about the intelligence document did not reflect it fairly or wholly, and gave too little credit to the administration for its understanding of a complex and evolving terror threat.

The leaked intelligence assessment was not the only one in recent weeks to question the administration's underlying assumptions about Iraq. The Washington Post reported Sept. 11 that the chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq had filed a secret report concluding that chances for securing Anbar Province were extremely dim. Officials told The Post this was the first time a senior U.S. military officer had filed so negative a report from Iraq.

Bush also said Tuesday that he would not be drawn into an argument with the former President Bill Clinton, who said in an interview aired Sunday on Fox-TV that the Bush administration had done too little in its first months in office to counter the Al Qaeda threat.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not shy from confronting those criticisms, doing so in an interview published Tuesday in The New York Post.

She directly challenged a claim by Clinton that he had done more than many of his conservative critics, including some in the Bush administration, to pursue Osama bin Laden.

And she rejected Clinton's assertion that he had left behind a comprehensive plan to fight Al Qaeda.

"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," she said, according to a transcript provided by the State Department.

Some Republicans have suggested that Clinton's furious rejoinder to the Fox interviewer - accusing him of carrying the water of Clinton's political foes - was more calculated than it might have seemed, aimed at giving Democrats the courage to fight back when Republicans brand them as weak on terror.

Clinton's wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, appeared to say as much.

"I just think that my husband did a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take this," she told Newsday on Monday.

The political adviser James Carville told NBC-TV on Tuesday that his former boss had given Democrats "a spinal implant."

Bush also used the news conference Tuesday to urge Congress to act quickly to pass legislation covering permissible treatment of suspected terrorists and the military commissions at which they may be tried.

Lawmakers are set to leave Washington at the end of the week to return to their districts to campaign ahead of the November elections, and the administration fears key legislation might not come to a vote.