NYT: Bush Makes Public Parts of Report on Terrorism

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/washington/27prexycnd.html

September 26, 2006

Bush Makes Public Parts of Report on Terrorism

By BRIAN KNOWLTON, International Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 -- The war in Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for Islamic militants, "breeding a deep resentment" of the United States in the Muslim world, according to declassified excerpts [1] from a major intelligence report that were released late this afternoon.

"The Iraqi jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere," the excerpts said.

The excerpts -- just over three pages from a document said to be 30 pages -- were ordered declassified by President Bush. Mr. Bush said earlier today that he was loath to declassify any classified document, but that news reports about the intelligence assessment could have led to "confusion" about its findings. The New York Times disclosed some of the findings over the weekend, showing that the Iraq war had invigorated Islamic radicalism and worsened the global terrorist threat.

The excerpts from the intelligence report pointed to a spread of terrorist activity globally for at least the next five years and said terrorists were adapting to the tactics used against them. "If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide," they said.

"Jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion," said the excerpted document, representing the key judgments of a National Intelligence Estimate completed in April 2006 and reflecting the consensus of the nation's 16 intelligence agencies.

The shorter document, drawn from the April assessment titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," was released by the office of the director of national security amid rising political pressure from Democrats for its declassification.

"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 for the global jihadist movement," the declassified document said. "Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight."

The document asserted that American-led counterterrorism efforts had seriously damaged the leadership of Al Qaeda and disrupted its operations. "However, we judge that Al Qaeda will continue to pose the greatest threat to the homeland and U.S. interests abroad by a single terrorist organization," it said.

Referring to jihadists around the world, it found that "the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the time frame of this Estimate."

That time frame, according to Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House adviser on homeland security, is the five years from April. She also said the document declassified included perhaps 95 percent of the full "key judgments" section in the intelligence estimate, including all references to Iraq.

"Maybe two or three paragraphs were redacted in the interests of national security," she said.

The report cites four factors fueling the spread of Islamic militancy: entrenched grievances and a sense of powerlessness; the Iraq "jihad"; the slow pace of reform in Muslim nations; and "pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims."

Ms. Townsend, in a conference call with reporters late this afternoon, was asked repeatedly about the assertion that jihadists were increasing both numerically and geographically, and she was asked to elaborate on the link between that growth and the Iraq war.

Counting jihadists, she said, was far from an exact science. Much of the report's determination reflected increased jihad-related Internet traffic. "It's difficult to count the number of true jihadists that are willing to commit murder," she added. "They don't nominate themselves to be counted."

She said that leaving Iraq would do nothing to stop the terrorists' threat. "Shrinking away from them, withdrawing from them, will not alleviate this problem," she said.

She underlined language in the report that said that "should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight."

Ms. Townsend emphasized the damage and disruption inflicted on Al Qaeda -- including thousands of terror suspects killed or captured -- and the importance of the long-term goal of promoting democracy. "The president has frequently made the point that freedom is the antidote to terror," she said.

The report, she noted, had been completed before the killing in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, someone it had posited could eventually "pose a global threat."

"That's obviously no longer a problem," Ms. Townsend said dryly.

President Bush was clearly unhappy that findings from the National Intelligence Estimate had made their way into news reports. Noting that evidence-gathering for the assessment had been concluded in February, and that the report itself had been finished two months later, Mr. Bush 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 disclosed that portions of the intelligence report would be declassified and released during a brief White House news conference alongside a crucial ally in the fight against terrorism, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.

Mr. Bush said people were drawing the wrong conclusion from the news reports about the intelligence findings.

"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 naive. 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."

Mr. Bush said he had asked John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, to declassify key findings of the assessment.

But the president made it clear that the matter angered him. "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 Mr. Negroponte to do so.

"I told the D.N.I. to declassify the document, you can read it for yourself," Mr. Bush said.

Ms. Townsend, like Bush, was harshly critical of those who had divulged details of the intelligence estimate to reporters. "With every unauthorized disclosure of classified information, it does harm to our national and homeland security," she said, and can hand "victory to our enemies who plot to kill us."

In a highly unusual move, the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, asked her colleagues today to convene a secret session of the House to discuss the full intelligence analysis, which she called "the administration's worst nightmare."

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

But Ms. Pelosi's request was quickly rebuffed in the Republican-dominated House, which defeated it in a 217-to-171 vote.

Democrats have seized on reports that the intelligence assessment links 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.

Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, had called earlier today for declassifying the assessment. She said 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," she said.

Ms. Harman said that the National Intelligence Estimate was "a document everyone should be able to read," and that she had asked Mr. Negroponte to produce a declassified summary.

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

Republican lawmakers have not disputed the accuracy of the reports describing the assessment's findings, but they have said a grave terror threat that predated the Sept. 11 attacks had to be faced head-on.

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

While Mr. Bush declined to confront those criticisms, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not shy from doing so in an interview published in The New York Post today.

She directly challenged a claim by Mr. Clinton that he had done more to pursue Osama bin Laden than many of his conservative critics, including some in the Bush administration, had been willing to do before Sept. 11, 2001.

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

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

Some Republicans have suggested that a furious response by Mr. Clinton to the Fox interviewer's questioning was more calculated than it might have seemed, aimed at pushing the Democrats to fight back when accused of being weak on terror.

Mr. 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 News today that his former boss had given Democrats "a spinal implant."

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/politics/nie20060926.pdf