White House Holds Ground on Terror Study

The White House defended its interpretation of declassified intelligence findings Wednesday, saying they back President Bush’s rationale for sticking with his strategy in Iraq, while Democrats and others said the document proved that the U.S. invasion had increased the terrorist threat.

The administration refused to release the full 30-page report, saying that doing so would endanger the lives of U.S. operatives and possibly reveal surveillance methods. The White House also rebuffed calls for the quick completion and release of a new intelligence report underway that focuses even more closely on conditions in Iraq. That report will not be finished before next year, the White House said.

The five-page portion of the report declassified and released Tuesday concluded that terrorism was growing and spreading worldwide, fueled by the war in Iraq, and that the “Iraq jihad” was shaping “a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.” The report is known as a National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus view of the CIA and all of the other 15 U.S. intelligence agencies.

White House spokesman Tony Snow, facing questions about how Bush’s views that the U.S. is winning the war against terrorism square with the considerably bleaker findings of the intelligence report, fiercely defended the president’s stance.

“Let’s start with the obvious: Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have not been attacked,” Snow said, adding that aggressive American tactics had made it difficult for terrorist organizations to mobilize and strike the United States.

A chorus of Democrats, however, countered that the report showed that the U.S.-led war in Iraq was inspiring, training and equipping militants to launch attacks elsewhere. “Iraq has become a breeding ground for terrorists,” Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) said. “The world is a much more dangerous place today.”

The debate over the intelligence findings comes as national security dominates the midterm election campaigns that will determine control of Congress, and as U.S. forces in Iraq struggle to establish order in Baghdad.

U.S. military officials in Iraq said Wednesday that the number of suicide attacks this week was the highest of any week since the war began. Without giving numbers, they said that attacks overall had risen in the last two weeks, especially in and around Baghdad, despite an ongoing U.S.-led crackdown on militants in the capital.

American intelligence officials said they did not expect any other portions of the intelligence estimate to be declassified. Officials from both parties who have read the document said the remaining pages provided far more detail on the complexion of the spread of Islamic radicalism, but were consistent with the “key judgments” that had been declassified.

“It just expands on those key judgments,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s not like there’s a Version A and a Version B. They are the underpinning or basis for the statements” that were released.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the complete report had “more information on Iraq, more nuance, more detail.”

“But I’m not telling you these key judgments are an unfair representation of the report,” she said.

The document was delivered to the House and Senate intelligence committees after its completion in April, but few members not on those panels have seen the entire report. Congressional officials said that Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte’s office had informed members this week that it planned to make the entire classified document available to all lawmakers.

The impact of the intelligence estimate prompted new calls Wednesday for faster completion of the second report in the works that is to focus exclusively on the situation in Iraq.

Frances Townsend, White House domestic security advisor, said Wednesday that the intelligence estimate focusing on Iraq was expected to be finished in January. A senior U.S. intelligence official cautioned, however, that Negroponte’s office had not set a timetable for the completion of the work, suggesting it could be delayed beyond the beginning of next year.

Harman called that “unacceptable” in a letter to Negroponte on Wednesday, and questioned whether there were political reasons for putting the report off until next year.

Work on the new intelligence estimate on Iraq was begun in August, after Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee requested a new, thorough intelligence examination of the state of the conflict there.

Meanwhile, the White House moved aggressively Wednesday to counter arguments from Democrats that the intelligence report painted a dismal picture of Bush’s policies and challenged administration descriptions of terrorist groups reeling under the U.S.-led assault.

“The critical judgment here is Iraq has become for [terrorists] the battleground,” Snow said. “If they lose, they lose their bragging rights. They lose their ability to recruit.... The president has made the point over and over.”

Snow said Bush’s position that Americans were safer now was not undermined by the intelligence estimate’s assertion that the number of jihadists had grown. Instead, Snow argued that militants were less organized than before, and that, as a result, the U.S. was less likely to be hit.

Bush “has not tried to say there are fewer,” Snow said. “He has not tried to say that they haven’t been winning propaganda victories. What he has said is: We’ve got a different kind of enemy, and we have kept America safe, and we will continue to do it.”

Snow said that the report, along with additional information about how terrorists were doing business, had prompted changes in U.S. strategy.

“It does, in fact, talk about a more dispersed terror network; it does talk about [how] people are communicating over the Internet; it does talk about the necessity of approaching this from a number of different angles,” he said. “So the answer is, yes, there has been a much more nuanced approach to doing this. And this is what happens as the war against terror continues. As they adjust, we adjust.”

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greg.miller@latimes.com

peter.wallsten@latimes.com