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NIE Games

26 September 2006

The Democrats have made much hay over the last day or so over leaks from the NIE (national intelligence estimate). The claim is that the NIE shows that the US presence in Iraq has contributed to al Qaeda recruitment with the result that we are less secure than we were before 9/11.

President Bush has fired back today, saying he will declassify parts of the NIE and make it available at www.dni.gov (look for it possibly as early as Tuesday afternoon) so that everyone can read what it says and decide for themselves. Bush claims the leaked portions of the report have been taken out of context and that it does not support what Democrats claim it supports.

The timing of the leak, considering the report came out in April, is suspicious on its face. That we are so close to the mid-term election lend credence to the notion that this is a purely political move. Additionally, the assertion that we were somehow safer when al Qaeda was attacking us on 9/11 is counter intuitive at best. There has been a constant drumbeat that our presence in Iraq is a recruiting tool for al Qaeda. While there may be an element of truth to this claim, it is also true that pretty much our very existence is also an effective recruiting tool. The implication that we should just bring everyone home and mind our own business is naive at best. Such thinking is the epitome of Chamberlain appeasement and it has been shown historically to be disastrous.

What has been interesting in this latest leak is the defense Democrats have offered for it. Repeatedly the claim is made that since the report conflicts with what Bush has been saying, we should see it, implying that leaking it was okay. At least that’s the way their defense is coming off.

This raises an interesting question. Do the Democrats believe that all classified information that does not support the president’s position should be public? If they believe that, do they believe that applies when a Democrat is in the White House?

We seem to have developed an environment in the Democrat party that says leaks are always okay if they undermine the President’s position. Their justification is that the President has been lying to us and we should know that. The evidence, of course, does not support the claim that the President has lied. It may support the assertion that he has been wrong on this or that question but that is not the same as lying.

A further question is, how can a President, any President, conduct a war, foreign policy, or any other function of the executive branch if he does not have the ability to keep classified information secret? I doubt very much whether any President has ever been in a position where all the intelligence at his disposal fully supported his choice of action in a war. How can a President be expected to carry out operations in a war when every piece of intelligence is leaked to the press?

I wrote a piece back in June with the title Some Call it Treason where I made the case that the New York Times should be charged with treason. But the media isn’t the only culpable entity here. Some in the administration are leaking important classified information that is harmful to our military efforts for political reasons and somehow that has to be stopped! The notion that each individual in government is free to make his or her own decisions about what should be public and what should not, based on their own personal opinions about politics is simply dangerous and is not supported in law or the Constitution. It is, in my view, treasonous for individuals in the government to intentionally undermine the military effort in a time of war, particularly for political reasons.

Our US intelligence community and state department are in dire need of a thorough house cleaning. The traitors need to be found, prosecuted and cleared out. We cannot hope to win this war with Islamic fascism, regardless of who the President is, so long as classified information continues to flow freely to the press.

UPDATE:

Hugh Hewitt has an excellent treatment of this subject here. He quotes Jack Kelly saying:

Attacking our enemies does tend to make them angrier. But they were angry enough to start with, and failing to respond to their attacks can have worse consequences than defeating them in battle.

Anyway, all we know about the NIE is what the leaker and the New York Times want us to know. That’s not enough.

There is, of course, much more. Hewitt’s column is well worth reading.

Technorati : NIE partisan politicize politics demagogue