A little background on NIEs.
A lot of Republicans are telling readers that it can’t be released because it’s classified.
Hardly.
It’s not at all uncommon for a declassified version of an NIE to be released to the public. Just go back to October 2002. The Iraq WMD NIE was provided to the senate intel committee on October 1st. A declassified summary was released to the public on October 5th. And still more of the NIE was released on October 9th.
There’s another dimension to that episode as well. As became clear a year later, in the declassification process, the White House made certain that most of the qualifications and questions about Iraq WMD were removed. So the public version of the NIE seemed far more powerful than the actual classified version. It was another effort to trick the public and it prevented senators who’d seen the report from discussing those parts of the report the White House had kept behind the veil of classification.
That’s well worth keeping in mind in this case since I understand there’s already been some earlier fiddling with this one.
It’s also been suggested that Democrats may not be that eager to see the full NIE released since there are suspicions it’s not as clear-cut as the newspaper headlines have suggested. That would not surprise me at all. Given the history of this administration, it’s hard to believe that the report is really a full exploration of the fiasco the administration has made of Iraq. But let’s see. Let’s find out. And let’s keep an eye out for a selective release which is the Bush White House’s favored response to this sort of situation.
