Intelligence Chief Curbs Declassifying Summaries

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
October 28, 2007
Pg. 2
By Pamela Hess, Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has reversed the recent practice of declassifying and releasing summaries of national intelligence estimates, a top intelligence official said Friday.
Knowing their words may be scrutinized outside the U.S. government chills analysts' willingness to provide unvarnished opinions and information, said David Shedd, a deputy to McConnell.
He told congressional aides and reporters that McConnell recently issued a directive making it more difficult to declassify the key judgments of national intelligence estimates, which are forward-looking analyses prepared for the White House and Congress that represent the consensus of the nation's 16 spy agencies on a single issue. The analysis comes from various sources including the CIA, the military and intelligence agencies inside federal departments.
Referring to the public release of the reports, Shedd said during a Capitol Hill briefing: "It affects the quality of what's written."
So far this year, the national intelligence director's office has released unclassified key judgments from three national intelligence estimates - two on Iraq and one on terrorist threats to the U.S. homeland.
The trend toward releasing NIEs started about four years ago, most notably with the White House's July 2003 disclosure of key judgments from a controversial NIE on Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program. The White House was pressured to release those findings after parts of the NIE that supported the Bush administration's case for war against Iraq were leaked to the press.
Steven Aftergood, the director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, says national intelligence estimates should be released in their entirety.
"That doesn't mean disclosing sensitive intelligence methods or the identity of confidential sources. But that's not what estimates are," Aftergood said. "The public needs unvarnished assessments as well. Without them, we stumbled our way into the war in Iraq."
The 2002 NIE contained a warning from the State Department's intelligence office that it did not believe Iraq was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. That dissenting opinion was not widely disclosed until after the war had already been launched.
 
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