“A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.”

These are the words that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times. However, this was not just interviews with top intelligence people that gave this assessment. It was something far more official: National Intelligence Estimate. If your aren’t familiar with the National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, SourceWatch has an excellent definition of it, provided by the CIA:

“National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue prepared by the Director of Central Intelligence. Unlike ‘current intelligence’ products, which describe the present, most NIEs forecast future developments and many address their implications for the United States. NIEs cover a wide range of issue–from military to technological to economic to political trends.

Also, the report requires the approval of the current director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, a Bush appointee and close ally of the President.

So, it really is no small thing when this says that the Iraq War is worsening the the terrorist threat to this country.

This latest estimate is the first since the Iraq War started so, it will, indeed, carry a lot of weight.

Why so long since it was released? Here’s a possible reason, cited in the article:

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

So, let’s see how the spin machine works today. With elections around the corner, I am sure the chickenhawks will have some explaining to do.

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