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White House Releases Intel Report on Terrorism

President Bush gestures as he answers questions from the media Tuesday.
Jim Watson
/
AFP/Getty Images
President Bush gestures as he answers questions from the media Tuesday.

President Bush has ordered the public release of the summary of a classified report by U.S. intelligence agencies on America's vulnerability to terrorist attack -- and how the war in Iraq affects the effort to fight terrorism.

Many of the findings suggest that conditions in Iraq are creating a terrorist breeding ground.

"The Iraq conflict has become the 'cause celebre' for jihadists," the report reads, "breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement."

Descriptions of the National Intelligence Estimate had surfaced in newspapers over the weekend, the result of what the president called politically motivated leaks.

Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte released the summary Tuesday -- the first time a current N.I.E. has been declassified since the flawed 2002 Iraq estimate.

News of the classified document overshadowed the president's meeting with Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, who said his country was grateful for U.S. support.

"I think it's a bad habit for our government to declassify every time there is a leak," President Bush said. "Because it means it will be difficult to get good product out of our analysts."

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.
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