Congress to Negroponte: Quit stalling on the Iraq NIE

By Ken Silverstein

On Monday, I reported that intelligence czar John Negroponte still had not sent Congress a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, even though lawmakers demanded it almost six months ago. Last week, as I disclosed, a senior intelligence official was expected to brief a closed-door session of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the new NIE; instead, he trotted out a number of lame excuses in explaining why the NIE was still not ready.

I was told that this “dog ate my homework” performance angered Congress, and evidence of that anger was made public yesterday, when four top Democrats—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and Rockefeller's House counterpart, Silvestre Reyes—wrote Negroponte to demand that the NIE be swiftly completed.

The lawmakers noted in their letter that President Bush has called for a “significant escalation of U.S. military involvement in Iraq,” and that Congress will soon need to make key legislative decisions regarding the course of the war. “It is in this context that we urge that every effort be made to bring the final deliberations regarding the NIE to a swift conclusion and that the key judgments of this NIE, like the previous Iraq NIE, be made available in unclassified form,” they wrote.

Commenting on the letter, Senator Edward Kennedy, who led last summer's effort to order Negroponte to produce a new NIE, said, “It's scandalous that the intelligence community hasn't updated its National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in more than two years. It's appalling that the President didn't request it before he announced his latest escalation of the war.”

The full press release from Democratic leaders is available online.