By Brian Ross, ABC News
Intelligence analysts and the former White House counterterror official describe as “pure pablum” the unclassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate released today on terror threats to the United States.
“Nothing in here is going to surprise anybody who’s been following this,” said one senior U.S. intelligence official.
“It’s more about what it doesn’t say than what it does say,” says Richard Clarke, the former White House official who is now an ABC News consultant.
“What is left out of the version released publicly is the explicit statement that al Qaeda is back and has operations underway,” Clarke says.
The 2006 version of the National Intelligence Estimate claimed U.S. efforts had “seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa’ida and disrupted its operations.”
“That’s no longer the case in 2007, and you have to read between the lines to understand how we have lost ground,” Clarke says.
(Original Article)