Today’s Must Read

How are things really going in Iraq? And should the American public know about it?

Next month, The Washington Post reports, the intelligence community will complete a national intelligence estimate on the situation in Iraq. If Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell has his way, the estimate will stay classified.

That’s because McConnell is no fan of public debate of intelligence issues. He’s said that all this debate about the surveillance bill ” means that some Americans are going to die.” And he thinks that NIEs should stay secret.

It was a policy that he tried to maintain with regard to the recent NIE on Iran — which effectively undercut the administration’s increasing alarmism about the nuclear threat of Iran by proclaiming that the intelligence community thought that Iran had suspended its nuclear program. McConnell and the administration only begrudgingly agreed to release that NIE, he explained to Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker, due to “the fear that, if we didn’t release it, it would leak, and the Administration at that point would be accused of hiding information.”

The intel community produced two NIEs last year, one in January (which used the phrase “civil war“), the other in August. Declassified versions of the key findings were released for each. Both sized up the shifting universe of security threats and emphasized the perilous political situation in the country.

This time around, however, things might be different. McConnell decreed in October that NIEs should no longer be released. And:

Intelligence officials said that the National Intelligence Board — made up of the heads of the 16 intelligence agencies plus McConnell — will decide whether to release the Iraq judgments once the estimate is completed. But they made clear that they lean toward a return to the traditional practice of keeping such documents secret.

So here’s the question. The NIE, which is apparently expected to be issued in April, would most likely be the last word from the intelligence community on the situation in Iraq before the election. Will the administration be able to keep it under wraps? Or will the fear of the report leaking again force it out into the open?