US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday that American intelligence reporting is inconsistent and occasionally incorrect, making it impossible to determine whether the number of Islamic extremists is increasing or decreasing.
Rumsfeld was speaking at a press conference in Portoroz, addressing a recently declassified national intelligence estimate that concluded the Iraq war had become a rallying point for radical Islamists, swelling and spreading jihadist networks worldwide. He declined to comment directly on the report's central conclusions.
Instead, he questioned the reliability of intelligence products in general, noting that analysts routinely hedge their findings and draw on sources of widely varying quality, from public records to classified material to information shared by allied nations.
On whether military action against militants was producing more recruits than it eliminated, Rumsfeld said the answer was simply unknowable: "We don't know. The world doesn't know." He argued that halting counterterrorism operations would not improve the situation, but acknowledged that Iraq's precise effect on jihadist fortunes could not be measured with certainty.
He added that no single cause or solution could fully explain or resolve the threat, calling any such single-factor analysis impossible given the complexity of the forces involved.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in September 2006, in its own words.