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Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, said releasing the full [NIE - National Intelligence Estimate], key points of which George Bush, the president, unexpectedly declassified on Tuesday after parts were leaked to the media last weekend, would jeopardise the lives of agents who gathered the information.

It would also risk the nation's ability to work with foreign governments and to keep secret its intelligence-gathering methods, Mr Snow said, and "compromise the independence of people doing intelligence analysis."

Mr Snow said the report confirmed the importance of the war in Iraq as a bulwark against terrorists. "Iraq has become, for them, the battleground," he said. "If they lose, they lose their bragging rights. They lose their ability to recruit."

...For Republicans, as Mr Snow stressed, it provides more evidence that Iraq is central to the war on terrorism and cannot be abandoned without giving jihadists a crucial victory.

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Only two days ago, while attempting to knock down stories by The New York Times and other publications about the NIE, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow insisted to reporters that the document's conclusions were entirely consistent with the public statements of the president and other Bush administration officials.

News reports on the NIE “contain nothing that the president hasn't said,” Snow told reporters in Riverside, Conn. “Obviously, we're not going to go into what the classified report does say, but … the substance is precisely what the president has been saying.”

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“Together with our coalition partners,” Bush said, “we've removed terrorist sanctuaries, disrupted their finances, killed and captured key operatives, broken up terrorist cells in American and other nations and stopped many attacks before they're carried out. We're on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront.…”

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"Some people have guessed what's in the report and concluded that going into Iraq was a mistake," Bush said Tuesday.

"I strongly disagree," he said, calling those views "naive." With portions of the report public, "everybody can draw their own conclusions," he said.

Bush also contended politics was behind the leak.

"Here we are, coming down the stretch in an election campaign and it's on the front page of your newspapers," he said. "Isn't that interesting?"

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