WASHINGTON, Sept 26: Bemoaning an election-year leak, President George Bush on Tuesday said he had ordered declassification of a secret terrorism document that included a judgment that the Iraq invasion had spread ‘Islamic extremism’.
At a news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Mr Bush said political opponents had disclosed only select parts of the National Intelligence Estimate, a US global report on terrorism, and he decided to make the document public so ‘you read it for yourself’.
“Somebody has taken it upon themselves to leak classified information for political purposes,” Mr Bush said.
The president said it was ‘naïve’ and ‘a mistake’ to think that the Iraq invasion had fuelled global terrorism, rejecting the reported conclusions of US spy agencies.
“My judgment is, if we weren’t in Iraq, they’d find some other excuse,” he said during the joint public appearance with President Hamid Karzai.
The report, disclosed over the weekend, said the analysis by the 16 spy agencies completed in April concluded the Iraq invasion had spread ‘Islamic radicalism’ and made the overall terrorism problem worse.
Democrats seized on it to criticise the Republican administration over the increasingly unpopular war, a key issue just weeks before the Nov 7 elections when control of both houses of the US Congress is at stake.
Mr Bush is intent on portraying his party as stronger on national security than Democrats and better able to protect Americans.
A public version of the intelligence document could be made available this week, officials said.
On Sunday, major US newspapers said that the secret report — a summary of the consensus view of the 16 US intelligence agencies — asserts that the occupation of Iraq was stoking extremism in the Muslim world.
The accounts, citing US officials familiar with the National Intelligence Estimate, appeared to contradict Bush’s campaign refrain that the US-led March 2003 invasion of Iraq has made the United States safer from terrorism.
But an official familiar with the document’s conclusions said the document warned darkly that a withdrawal from Iraq would also embolden Islamist extremists — something Mr Bush also maintains.—Reuters/AFP
