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U.S. intel chief to restrict estimates

An official says public release of the reports affects the "quality of what's written."

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

Knowing their words may be scrutinized outside the U.S. 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, 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 CIAand the military.

Referring to the public release of the reports, Shedd said during a Capitol Hill 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 U.S. homeland.

The trend toward releasing NIEs started 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 media.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, says the 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."

[Last modified October 27, 2007, 01:25:05]