Iraq National Intelligence Estimate Will Advise Against Sending More Troops...

Delayed Iraq NIE Will Undermine Case For Escalation

Six months ago, Harper’s Ken Silverstein reported that “in spite of pressure from CIA analysts, intelligence czar John Negroponte was blocking a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq.” National Intelligence Estimates present the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. Despite pressure from Congress, the administration insisted it could not complete the NIE until January 2007.

Last week, however, an administration intelligence official told senators that the report is still not complete. According to Silverstein, Senate hearing attendees “believe that senior intelligence officials are stalling because an NIE will be bleak enough to present a significant political liability.”

Yesterday, NPR host Diane Rehm may have revealed why the NIE remains so politically sensitive. On her national radio show, Rehm said:

Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and the House and Senate intelligence committee chairmen wrote President Bush “urging prompt completion of a national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Iraq first requested by Congress six months ago.”

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/01/25/rehm-iraq-nie/

The letter...

January 23, 2007

The Honorable John D. Negroponte
Director of National Intelligence
Washington, D.C.


Dear Director Negroponte:

As you know, last July members of Congress requested an updated national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Iraq. This request was subsequently supported by the full House and Senate in the Fiscal Year 2007 Department of Defense appropriations conference report and signed into law by the President (P.L. 109-289).

We were pleased that you directed the intelligence community to produce a new Iraq NIE. We also appreciate the other Iraq-related intelligence products and recent briefings and testimony you and your analysts have provided Congress. However, it now has been six months since we placed the request for the NIE and the community has yet to complete it.

We recognize the importance of taking the time needed to prepare a comprehensive, objective and thoroughly-coordinated estimate. We want your analysts to provide their best professional judgments and ensure that alternative and dissenting views are fully laid out. However, Iraq has properly been at the top of the intelligence community’s list of priorities for quite some time and the community has compiled a considerable body of work on Iraq before and after our request. We believe the intelligence community has had more than sufficient time to complete this estimate.

Since we registered our request, the situation in Iraq has continued to deteriorate. U.S. troops and the Iraqi people have borne the brunt of this violence. More than 3,000 Americans have been killed in this conflict and more than 20,000 injured. According to a recent United Nations report, more than 30,000 Iraqis were killed just in 2006. In response to this deterioration and violence, the President recently announced a significant escalation of US military involvement in Iraq. The events in Iraq and here at home have triggered a debate in Congress about the merits of the President’s latest proposal and whether it would improve the situation in Iraq and advance our national security interests around the world. A number of legislative actions may soon be considered, including the appropriation of additional taxpayer resources for Iraq that could push total costs for the war to well over $400 billion.

The upcoming debate on Iraq is an important one for our troops and our country. The American people have a right to expect that their elected representatives will be fully informed at the outset of the debate in order to increase accountability for results and to increase the chances for a bipartisan consensus on a way forward.

It is in this context that we urge that every effort be made to bring the final deliberations regarding the NIE to a swift conclusion and that the key judgments of this NIE, like the previous Iraq NIE, be made available in unclassified form. The Administration has declassified key intelligence findings on many issues, asserting that declassification in these instances was in the public interest and did not compromise intelligence sources or methods. An unclassified summary of the key judgments of this NIE will be essential to conducting a thorough and complete debate and we believe it can be produced without jeopardizing our intelligence capabilities.

Thank you for your consideration of these requests, and thank you for your work on behalf of the American people and the men and women of the intelligence community.


Sincerely,


Harry Reid
Senate Majority Leader

Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House of Representatives


John D. Rockefeller IV
Chairman
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence


Silvestre Reyes
Chairman
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence




http://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/pressreleases?id=0048

 

The Whitehouse blocking intelligence for political gain?

Say it ain't so!

 

Negroponte: Iraq NIE Coming "First Thing Next Week"

The NIE, requested last July by Democrats, has been a long time coming. The situation came to a head a couple of weeks ago when an administration official reportedly explained in a closed door session of the Senate Judiciary Committee that intelligence officials were just too busy getting the plans together for President Bush's escalation of troops in Iraq to finish up the NIE.

Outraged, Democrats demanded that Negroponte finish up the estimate, which, they argued, should have been completed before Bush's announcement of a new strategy in Iraq, and not after.

So now the NIE is finally on its way. What will it say? The public -- and Congress -- will just have to wait until next week. Negroponte refused to characterize the findings of the estimate in any way.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002435.php

 

Shocking!

No Public Iraq NIE?

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has some sharp elbows. During her questioning of Director of National Intelligence nominee Mike McConnell, the senator pointedly said that she expected the DNI's office to release its forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq tomorrow.

I immediately placed a call to the Office of the DNI to find out if that was in fact the case, and the rather harried spokeswoman suggested that it wasn't -- that Feinstein was putting a bit of subtle pressure on ODNI to get the estimate to Capitol Hill before the weekend. Keeping with what outgoing DNI John Negroponte said earlier this week, the NIE will be out by Monday, but not necessarily tomorrow, she said.

Of course, you might not see it. The spokeswoman added that "no decision has been made about declassification" of the NIE. So, unless you've got a security clearance, as of this writing, you're not going to read what the intelligence community assesses about the current state of the Iraq war. Never mind that last week, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) -- joined by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), the congressional intelligence committee chairs -- called for a public version of the document to be released.

In one sense, that's not so surprising. After all, the NIE is expected to find that Iraq's political scene is even worse than you've been reading. And considering that the entire point of the "surge" is to give Iraq's political scene a bit of breathing room, the NIE will give surge-skeptics grounds to object that the foundational premise of Bush's strategy is seriously flawed. Negroponte, no great fan of openness, would understandably want to limit the damage.

Whether that strategem will succeed is a thornier question. This isn't 2002 anymore. Now that both Democratic and GOP senators are coalescing around the Levin-Warner anti-surge resolution, a recalcitrant DNI is sure to get an earful from anti-surge Senators eager to show their constituents why they can't get on board with the president's strategy. Maybe we'll get some resolution of this tomorrow -- thanks in large part to Dianne Feinstein.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002461.php

 

9 pages declassified out of a 90 page document. Well really 5 as the first 4 is just into.

NIE: The Surge Can't Work

Wow, this is grim. According to the just-released Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, political reconciliation is likely a bridge too far over the next year and a half.

The Sunnis remain "unwilling to accept minority status" and believe the Shiite majority is a stalking horse for Iran. The Shiites remain "deeply insecure" about their hold on power, meaning that the Shiite leadership views U.S.-desired compromises -- on oil, federalism and power-sharing -- as a threat to its position. Perhaps most ominously, the upcoming referendum on the oil-rich, multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk threatens to be explosive, as the Kurds are determined to finally regain full control over the city.

Interestingly, the listed prospects for reversing Iraq's deterioration contradict the NIE's assessment of where things actually stand. For instance, "broader Sunni acceptance of the current political structure and federalism" and "significant concessions by Shia and Kurds" could lead to stability -- but the NIE's earlier section viewed both these events as unlikely. To put this in the realm of the current debate, President Bush's "surge" is designed to give political breathing room to events that the intelligence community formally judges as unrealistic:

About Iran. This must have been one of the most controversial elements of the estimate: Iraq's neighbors are "not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq's internal sectarian dynamics." There's the expected qualifications that Iran and Syria are up to no good, but this is the major point. In other words, no matter how much Bush wants to lay the blame for the disintegration of Iraq on the meddlesome interference of Iran and Syria, the U.S.-sponsored political process itself -- indeed, the new, U.S.-midwifed Iraqi political order -- itself sows the seeds for the country's destruction. Apparently Bush could attack Iran to his heart's content, and Iraq would still remain inflamed.

Oh, and one final thought: this is just what's unclassified. If past NIEs are any prologue, what remains classified is much, much grimmer than what we see here. More likely than not, this is the most optimistic presentation of the NIE possible.

Happy Friday.
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002469.php

The declassified pages
http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20070202_release.pdf

 

The NIE on the term "civil war"