Austin Bay Blog

I expected a White House rebuttal of the NY Times’ latest “intel leak.”

Via the LA Times:

Sunday’s newspaper articles on the National Intelligence Estimate — by the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times — were “not representative of the complete document,” the White House said. That assessment was echoed by National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte, whose office prepared the report.

In a statement e-mailed to reporters Sunday afternoon, Negroponte said “the conclusions of the intelligence community are designed to be comprehensive, and viewing them through the narrow prism of a fraction of judgments distorts the broad framework they create.”

“The Estimate highlights the importance of the outcome in Iraq on the future of global jihadism,” he said. If Iraq develops “a stable political and security environment, the jihadists will be perceived to have failed, and fewer jihadists will leave Iraq determined to carry on the fight elsewhere.”

There is “an enormous and constantly mutating struggle before us in the long war on terror,” Negroponte said.

Senate Armed Services Committee member John McCain (R-Ariz.), a likely 2008 presidential candidate, agreed with the White House view that such radicalism predated the toppling of Hussein and that radicals were always looking for reasons to recruit jihadists.

The American Thinker examine the political timing of the NY Times’ September claims about a document which appeared in Aprilt.

Here’s a link to the original NY Times’ Sunday story. (My broadband went out Saturday afternoon and was not repaired until Sunday evening.)

The Administration needs to publish a declassified version of the NIE. If the NY Times spun the story the paper’s spin deserves to be exposed. If it didn’t, we need to know that, too.