Not A Particularly Bleak Estimate
Despite the fact that the now-declassified summary of the National Intelligence Estimate shows that the findings of the report, though somewhat mixed, are rather supportive of the President’s decision to invade Iraq the media continues to refer to it as a “bleak assessment.” In fact, a Google News search for “bleak national security estimate” shows that the term, or some derivative of it, is being used again and again by journalists to describe the report.
The New York Times is saying the report shows the invasion of Iraq was a “cataclysmic disaster.” USA Today is saying the report shows “the war has unquestionably intensified global anger toward the USA and made the world a more dangerous place.”
The Boston Globe takes the amazingly galling position of stating that a full-on declassification of the entire NIE report (rather than just the summary) would “clear the air of White House propaganda.” As though the summary of the memo wasn’t already declassified to clear the air of anti-Bush propaganda being pushed by the press/Democrats who were busy hyping the cherry-picked portions of the memo which were leaked previously.
Just as anecdotal evidence of how well and fully Americans have been deceived with this coordinated political hit (and that’s exactly what it is), I actually heard a man sitting at another table at breakfast today tell his friends that Bush “is now leaking classified information for political purposes.” The media publishes illegally leaked information from the NIE so the President declassifies the full summary of the report to clear the air and then he gets accused of playing politics. Unbelievable, isn’t it? And yet that’s exactly the angle the media/Democrats are pushing now. Along with the idea that the full NIE memo should now be declassified, which is a bit of a convenient strawman for them. They know full well that the entire NIE report can’t be published as it contains some very specific details about what we know about our enemies and how we found it out, yet that won’t stop them from calling for it to draw attention away from the political motivations behind the original leak of information.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to get at is the one Jules Crittenden makes in this column in the Boston Herald:
