Building on Kevin Drum’s timeline of the administration’s decision to declassify portions of the National Intelligence Estimate, here’s a more complete rendering for those of you trying to get a hold on this. It’s a mini-history of the administration’s political manipulations of this classified document.
September, 2002 – The CIA puts together the National Intelligence Estimate, a summary of the intelligence community’s judgment of the Iraq threat. After reading it and seeing that it rebutted a number of the administration’s public claims, Sens. Bob Graham (D-FL) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) ask that a declassified version be made available for the public.
October 4, 2002 – A much shorter declassified version, scrubbed of all dissenting opinions that were contained in the original version, is released. “It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed [WMDs], avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version.”
Sen. Graham demands that the administration release the dissenting portions.
October 7, 2002 – In response, CIA Director George Tenet writes a letter to Graham declassifying a statement in the NIE that there was a “low” likelihood of Iraq launching an unprovoked attack on the United States. Graham demands that Tenet declassify more of the dissenting opinions in the report, but the White House orders Tenet not to. (The New Republic, 6/30/03)
July 8, 2003: Scooter Libby, acting on the President’s orders, discloses classified portions of the NIE to Judy Miller. These portions, which were not released in October, are released to counter Joseph Wilson’s statement that Iraq wasn’t seeking uranium from Africa before the war.
July 11, 2003: Time reporter Matthew Cooper speaks with Karl Rove. Rove assured him that “material was going to be declassified in the coming days that would cast doubt on Wilson’s mission and his findings.”
July 18, 2003: Those portions of the NIE are officially declassified.
