Trite intelligence

NIE report tells you everything you already knew

Published July 20, 2007 at midnight

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Al-Qaida will come to get us if we don't watch out. So warns the latest National Intelligence Estimate from the U.S. intelligence community, in a judgment that is as predictable as the popularity of J.K. Rowling's final installment in the Harry Potter series.

So far, much of the reaction to the NIE is equally predictable. Democratic presidential candidates cite its dire rhetoric as evidence that the war on terror has gone badly awry. Stalwart defenders of that war, such as The Wall Street Journal editorial page, see the report "as a stark reminder that al-Qaida and other radical Islamist groups continue to pose an urgent threat to our security . . ."

Of all the politicians and pundits we've heard and read, however, none characterizes the actual content of the intelligence report more honestly than Gabriel Schoenfeld of Commentary magazine. "The NIE appears, at least in its unclassified form," Schoenfeld writes on the magazine's blog, "to be a shining example of bureaucratic self-protection. The CIA and affiliated agencies do not want to be wrong again; and they have found a way never to be wrong: by stating the obvious and calling it a National Intelligence Estimate."

Schoenfeld hits it dead on. We couldn't find a single surprising or even controversial statement in the NIE assessment, which is titled "The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland." Instead, it is replete with conventional wisdom, including "the U.S. Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years. The main threat comes from Islamic terrorist groups and cells, especially al-Qaida, driven by their undiminished intent to attack the Homeland and a continued effort by these terrorist groups to adapt and improve their capabilities."

Even the points that might have provoked alarm before 9/11, such as "we judge that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment," are the sort of warning that has become utterly familiar to Americans in the past six years. From the bureaucratic perspective, it's only prudent to forecast the worst. If it fails to materialize you will be forgiven. But you will never be forgiven if you minimize the danger and a terrorist attack levels another landmark.

We're not disparaging the seriousness of the effort that went into the assessment. We just don't see how it adds one iota of new information to the national debate over foreign policy and the war in Iraq. Sometimes intelligence officials alert officials to something they didn't know. And sometimes, as Schoenfeld reminds us, they merely repeat the contents of the 6 o'clock news.

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