Democrats step up NIE pressure on White House
Keeping pressure on the White House after it released a summary of a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism this week, Democrats are calling for the release of a separate NIE estimate focusing on Iraq.
Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to intelligence director John Negroponte this week, requesting that a classified version of the report be given to Congress and an unclassified version be prepared for the public. Harman and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi both suggested that release of the Iraq NIE has been delayed for political purposes.
"I hear it paints a grim picture," Harman said Tuesday at the National Press Club. "And because it does, I am told it is being held until after the November elections."
Asked about the request, homeland security adviser Frances Townsend said that work on the Iraq NIE did not start until August and that the research and writing of the report will take until January. She denied any political motivation behind the timeframe.
Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told U.S. News that the Iraq NIE is not finished and that he has not seen a draft, adding that efforts to characterize the unfinished work were irresponsible.
"This is desperate people looking for bad news," he says.
The clash follows the release of the "key judgments" of an NIE on terrorism done by the U.S. intelligence community last April, which says the Iraq conflict has become "the 'cause célèbre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters of the global jihadist movement."
The conclusion about Iraq has been offered before by U.S. officials, but to include it in an NIE is significant because the NIE is a formal document that represents the consensus opinion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. The abbreviated four-page document offers few details and sheds little light on how the intelligence agencies came to these conclusions or whether any agencies dissented on parts of the estimate.
The classified report became a political football overnight after the New York Times reported over the weekend that the NIE concluded that U.S. actions in Iraq have exacerbated the terrorist threat. President Bush said he ordered the release to demonstrate that the estimate was a broader assessment of how the terrorist threat has changed since September 11.
The section on Iraq, for instance, also warns that "perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere."
More broadly, the report claims some progress in degrading the leadership of the al Qaeda terrorist network while warning that the threat has become broader and more diverse.
"Activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion," the report says. "We assess that the global jihadist movement is decentralized, lacks a coherent global strategy, and is becoming more diffuse."
The NIE identifies Europe as a primary battleground for many jihadists, particularly several Sunni extremist groups that have allied themselves with al Qaeda. The findings echo what U.S. intelligence officials have been talking about for several years. For example, U.S. News explored the franchising of al Qaeda by focusing on an Algerian affiliate called the Salafist Group for Call and Combat. The report also warns that al Qaeda is trying to exploit the situation in Iraq. It was written before Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who allied himself with al Qaeda, was killed by U.S. forces.
But already, U.S. intelligence agencies were noting that Iraqis were playing an increased role in managing al Qaeda's operations in Iraq.
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