Because We Wouldn't Want THAT Information To Get Out

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says...

Fool me once - by publicly releasing the NIE on Iran showing they gave up their nuclear ambitions four years ago - shame on, shame on you...

Fool me twice...

A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is scheduled to be completed this month, according to U.S. intelligence officials. But leaders of the intelligence community have not decided whether to make its key judgments public, a step that caused an uproar when key judgments in an NIE about Iran were released in November.

...you can't get fooled again.

Intelligence officials said that the National Intelligence Board -- made up of the heads of the 16 intelligence agencies plus McConnell -- will decide whether to release the Iraq judgments once the estimate is completed. But they made clear that they lean toward a return to the traditional practice of keeping such documents secret.

In internal guidance he issued in October, McConnell said that his policy was that they "should not be declassified." One month later, however, the intelligence board decided to publicly release key judgments from an NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons program, saying that it had weighed "the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security against the necessity to protect classified information."

I'm surprised they got the Iran one through. Obviously, the nature of how that blew up in the Administration's face is keeping them from ever doing something so profoundly silly again.

As for the Bushism, I think we have a new winner, and it's about Iraq so it applies:

"I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who were trying to defeat us in Iraq."

Really, just shoot me in the head.