The NIE on AQ is nothing new

The administration published this afternoon a newly released, and surprisingly short, declassified summary of the key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate on al Qaeda. The document is online for all to see.

The startling new revelations are … far and few between. The terrorist network is rebuilding, its leadership is located largely in tribal areas of Pakistan, and it’s still focused on committing acts of terror ‘without requiring a centralized terrorist organization, training camp or leader.”

If the president’s allies are looking for rhetorical ammunition it can exploit for political gain, there’s not a whole lot for them to work with. The summary doesn’t finger Iran (sorry, Joe Lieberman), and makes a distinction between al Qaeda and AQI. As Kevin put it, “In other words, the main continuing threats to the American homeland come from (a) tribal areas near Afghanistan that became al-Qaeda strongholds due to our failure to prevent their retreat five years ago, and (b) AQI, which is largely a creation of the invasion of Iraq.” Somehow, the White House still claims credibility on counter-terrorism.

Perhaps more importantly, Spencer Ackerman notes that the document is important for what it doesn’t say.

National Intelligence Council in 2005, for instance, called Iraq the new “breeding ground” for “professionalized” terror. An April 2006 NIE, which remains classified, plainly said the war “has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” as one intelligence official told the New York Times. It’s hard to see how this could be controversial: there would be no al-Qaeda in Iraq — which the National Intelligence Estimate today says “energize(s) the broader Sunni extremist community” — had there been no invasion.

Yet the declassified key judgments of the NIE don’t address Iraq — except for a few bizarrely constructed sentences. What gives with the NIE’s weaselly wording?

That’s not to say [AQI attacks against the U.S. homeland] couldn’t happen. But when the NIE has to strain to find ways to tie AQI to possible domestic attacks, it’s probably a sign that AQI is otherwise preoccupied. The war itself is contributing a base of knowledge to the annals of jihad, spreading from Iraq and outwards, largely through the internet.

A report from ABC News suggests that intelligence analysts, including former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, are even less impressed with today’s release, calling it “pure pabulum.”

“Nothing in here is going to surprise anybody who’s been following this,” said one senior U.S. intelligence official.

“It’s more about what it doesn’t say than what it does say,” says Richard Clarke, the former White House official who is now an ABC News consultant. “What is left out of the version released publicly is the explicit statement that al Qaeda is back and has operations underway,” Clarke says.

The 2006 version of the National Intelligence Estimate claimed U.S. efforts had “seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa’ida and disrupted its operations.”

“That’s no longer the case in 2007, and you have to read between the lines to understand how we have lost ground,” Clarke says. […]

“Given that there was no al Qaeda in Iraq until we invaded there,” says Clarke, “it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that going to Iraq has created a further threat to the United States.”

And as long as we’re on the subject, the WaPo reports today that the U.S. military recently conducted war-games exercises to gauge what they could expect if U.S. combat forces withdraw from Iraq in the near future. The results regarding al Qaeda were particularly noteworthy.

What is perhaps most striking about the military’s simulations is that its post-drawdown scenarios focus on civil war and regional intervention and upheaval rather than the establishment of an al-Qaeda sanctuary in Iraq.

For Bush, however, that is the primary risk of withdrawal. “It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al-Qaeda,” he said in a news conference last week. “It would mean that we’d be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we’d allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan.” If U.S. troops leave too soon, Bush said, they would probably “have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous.”

Withdrawal would also “confuse and frighten friends and allies in the region and embolden Syria and especially Iran, which would then exert its influence throughout the Middle East,” the president said. […]

U.S. intelligence analysts, however, have a somewhat different view of al-Qaeda’s presence in Iraq.

Another talking point to discard, right Karl?