McClatchy: NIE report card gives Bush a 'D'

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/galloway/story/18120.html

NIE report card gives Bush a 'D'
By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

* Posted on Wed, July 18, 2007


It was report card time this week, never one of George W. Bush's happier moments, and the news was anything but good.

Never mind the usual grades on English and math or coloring inside the lines, or those teacher notes on the bottom about plays well with others. It was that big fat "D" in the column War on Terror that had them sweating at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Remember how President Bush had al Qaida and Osama bin Laden "on the run" and how it was only a matter of time until we found and brought to justice that elusive 6 foot 7 inch Saudi Arabian terror mastermind who attacked the United States and killed some 3,000 of our people?

Well, six years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, Osama's back and he's bigger and badder than ever, according to a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released this week-the first in years that sounded like it was written by someone other than Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

The intelligence community's assessment is that, far from making the United States a safer place, the Bush administration has actually lost ground in the fight against an al Qaida that has grown significantly stronger in recent years.

Despite much-ballyhooed announcements about the killing or capture of this or that right-hand man, the assessment said that Osama has rebuilt a stronger, more dangerous network that remains focused on attacking the United States and its people.

And where has this taken place? In Iraq, where we have 150,000 troops and another 185,000 private contractors bogged down in the middle of a civil war at a cost of $12 billion and over 100 dead Americans a month? The same Iraq that the President has repeatedly identified as the central focus, the cockpit actually, of his global war on terror?

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