Backing Policy, President Issues Terror Estimate
Jason
Reed/Reuters
President
Bush with President Hamid Karzai
of
Published:
September 27, 2006
Stephen
Crowley/The New York Times
President Bush suggested
that leaks of an intelligence document were politically motivated.
Mandel
Ngan/AFP-Getty Images
President Bush made the
comments during a White House news conference with President Hamid Karzai of
The
report, a comprehensive assessment of terrorism produced in April by American
intelligence agencies, said the invasion and occupation of Iraq had become a “cause
célèbre” for jihadists. It identified the jihad in
The intelligence
estimate said American-led counterterrorism efforts in the past five years had
“seriously damaged the leadership of Al Qaeda and disrupted its
operations.” But it said that Al Qaeda continued to pose the greatest threat to
American interests among terrorism organizations, and that the global jihadist movement overall was “spreading and adapting to
counterterrorism efforts.”
The estimate predicted
that over the next five years the factors fueling the spread of global jihad were
likely to be more powerful than those that might slow it.
The White House ordered
portions of the intelligence estimate declassified to counter what it described
as mischaracterizations about its findings in news reports.
The Bush administration
had initially resisted releasing the document but changed course after being
pressured to declassify the report by Republicans, including Senator
Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and by
the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.
At a news conference on
Tuesday where he announced the release of portions of the document, President
Bush suggested forcefully that news reports in the past two days about the
document had been based on politically motivated leaks.
“You know, to suggest
that if we weren’t in
The intelligence
estimate says that if jihadists who leave
Democrats seized on the
document’s conclusions as proof that the invasion of
“The war in
The estimate was the
first formal appraisal of the terrorism threat by American intelligence
agencies since the invasion of
The release of the
findings added fuel to an intense political debate about the administration’s
record in combating terrorism. Mr. Bush used the news conference to reassert
his view that the
He also attributed the
disclosure of some of the assessment findings to what he said were government
officials leaking classified information to “create confusion in the minds of
the American people” weeks before an important Congressional election.
The first article on the
findings was published Sunday in The New York Times after more than five weeks
of reporting. More than a dozen United States government officials and outside
experts were interviewed for the article, including employees of several
government agencies and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration.
Democrats also
criticized the White House for only declassifying part of the report, and the
House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, tried
and failed to persuade Republicans to agree to a vote that would have shut the
doors of the House of Representatives to allow members to read the entire
classified report.
Officials who have read
the entire document said the still-classified portion contained a more detailed
analysis of the impact of the
National intelligence
estimates are the most authoritative documents that American intelligence
agencies produce on a specific national security issue. They represent the
consensus view of the 16 intelligence agencies in government, and are approved
by John D. Negroponte,
director of national intelligence.
The release on Tuesday
of portions of the document was the second time that the Bush administration
had come under political pressure to declassify a national intelligence
estimate.
In July 2003, the White
House released the principal judgments of an October 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs in an attempt to address a furor over
the origins of President Bush’s statement, made in a State of the Union
address, that Saddam Hussein had been trying
to buy nuclear materials in Niger.
In recent months,
without disclosing the existence of the intelligence estimate on terrorism,
some senior American intelligence officials have given glimpses into its
conclusions. During a speech in
“If this trend continues, threats to the
But the intelligence
assessment paints a starker picture of the role that the
The intelligence report
specifically cited the role of the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, who led the Iraqi group Al Qaeda in
Mesopotamia, in attracting new recruits for the jihad cause in Iraq, and stated
that “should al-Zarqawi continue to evade capture and
scale back attacks against Muslims, we assess he could broaden his popular
appeal and present a global threat.”
He was killed by
American forces in June.
Frances Fragos Townsend, the president’s homeland security adviser,
suggested to reporters on Tuesday that the killing of Mr. Zarqawi
might ultimately help dampen the appeal of jihad in
At the same time, the
report concludes that the increased role of Iraqis in managing the operations
of Al Qaeda in
To be successful in
combating the spread of a radical ideology, the assessment states, the