Time To De-Classify NIE Report

President Bush can ill afford to lose more skirmishes in the PR War on Terror. Dems and/or anti-Bush intelligence officials and their MSM friends scored a win over the weekend with the selective leaking of negative news from the classified National Intelligence Estimate.

A report today on In from the Cold convinces me it's time to strike back with the declassification of selected portions of the report to show America the dangerous anti-American game the leakers are playing. Unlike the NYT, WaPo and LAT accounts, Spook 86 at In from the Cold quotes actual passages from the report, leaked to him from sources within the intelligence community. Here's a sampling:

• "Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves to have failed, we judge that fewer will carry on the fight."
  
  
• U.S.-led efforts have "seriously damaged Al Qaida leadership and disrupted its operations."
  
  
• "Threats to the U.S. are intrinsically linked to U.S. success or failure in Iraq."

See also Jack Kelly at Real Clear Politics, who writes:

[Andrew] Cochran [of Counterterrorism Blog] proposed that President Bush authorize the 9/11 Commission to review the NIE and release an unclassified version "as soon as possible."

I'm for declassifying as much of the NIE as can be done without breaching security. But the Bush administration should not be put in the position of having to choose between protecting itself (by declassifying the report and exposing distortions) or protecting our nation's secrets.

What should trouble us most about the New York Times story is not the dubious proposition it advances that the war in Iraq has made the struggle against Islamic radicalism more difficult. It is that there are people in the intelligence community who use secret intelligence for partisan political purposes.

How is it that the supposedly intelligent people at the major media continue to think they can get away with unethical presentation of the news? Frankly, it's because our government's response is no different than its response to al Qaeda during the 1980s and 1990s.

As long as the media goes along, unconfronted, undefeated, it will continue to bias the news towards its un-American perspective. It cares not one iota about we bloggers, but it does care about national embarassment on mainstream outlets -- not just a proverbial cruise missile launched at an empty training camp, but an ongoing campaign of discrediting and embarassing the decision-makers at these papers. The NIE story is the perfect launch vehicle.

Will Bush fight or fold?

hat-tip: memeorandum
Related Tags: NIE, National Intelligence Estimate, MSM, Media bias, Terror, War on Terror, In from the Cold