October 28, 2007	Sunday	Shawwal 15, 1428

WASHINGTON: National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has reversed the recent practice of declassifying and releasing summaries of national intelligence estimates, a top US intelligence official said on Friday.

Knowing their words may be scrutinised outside the US government chills analysts’ willingness to provide unvarnished opinions and information, said David Shedd, a deputy to McConnell.

He told congressional aides and reporters that McConnell recently issued a directive making it more difficult to declassify the key judgments of national intelligence estimates, or NIEs, which are forward-looking analyses prepared for the White House and Congress that represent the consensus of the nation’s 16 spy agencies on a single issue. The analysis comes from various sources including the CIA, the military and intelligence agencies inside federal departments.

Referring to the public release of the reports, Shedd said during a congressional briefing: “It affects the quality of what’s written.”

So far this year, the national intelligence director’s office has released unclassified key judgments from three NIEs — two on Iraq and one on terrorist threats to the US homeland.

The trend toward releasing NIEs started about four years ago, most notably with the White House’s July 2003 disclosure of key judgments from a controversial NIE on Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction program. The White House was pressured to release those findings after parts of the NIE that supported the Bush administration’s case for war against Iraq were leaked to the press.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, says national intelligence estimates should be released in their entirety.

“That doesn’t mean disclosing sensitive intelligence methods or the identity of confidential sources. But that’s not what estimates are,” Aftergood said. “The public needs unvarnished assessments as well. Without them, we stumbled our way into the war in Iraq.”

The 2002 NIE contained a warning from the State Department’s intelligence office that it did not believe Iraq was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. That dissenting opinion was not widely disclosed until after the war had already been launched, largely on the president’s assertion that Saddam Hussein’s program for weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat.Robert Jervis, a Columbia University professor who chairs an advisory panel for the CIA on the declassification of historical documents, said releasing intelligence estimates increases the likelihood their contents will be used for political rather than foreign policy purposes, and influences how they are worded.

“In an ideal world these documents would be as objective, as honest, as separated from the political preferences of the top people as possible,” Jervis said. “If that’s going to be public, you make the pressures of politicisation that much greater. When you are writing an executive summary it’s hard not to ask ‘How is this sentence going to read in The New York Times?’”

Jervis, who calls himself “pro-openness,” nevertheless favours keeping most NIEs completely out of the public eye.

“There are some things that should be secret,” he said. “If an NIE is any good at all on a hot topic, it’s going to draw heavily on secret information.”—AP