Glenn Greenwald says "this report alone ought to dictate the outcome of the election."

If you haven’t heard the news, a leaked internal government report — a government report from the Bush Administration — says "No".

A classified intelligence report concludes that the Iraq war has worsened the terrorist threat to the United States, U.S. officials told CNN Sunday.

Some intelligence officials have said as much in the past, but the newly revealed document is the first formal report on global trends in terrorism by the National Intelligence Estimate, which is put out by the National Intelligence Council.

Now, this isn’t some minor memo from some little rinky-dink intelligence office.  The National Intelligence Estimate is the consensus judgment of the entire US intelligence community, with input from all the different agencies, from CIA and DIA to INR and FBI and all the others. In other words, this is the collaborative judgment of the people actually fighting the War on Terror.

The report is six weeks old, and while it has no doubt been read by Bush, he has been out there saying the OPPOSITE thing.  Here’s what he said on August 21:

You know, I’ve heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of “we’re going to stir up the hornet’s nest” theory. It just doesn’t hold water, as far as I’m concerned. The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

He said that, knowing that his entire intelligence community — 16 separate spy services from the FBI to the CIA to other acronyms — all said just the opposite!

Josh Marshall puts this in perspective:

For the last six weeks and, in fact, the last six months, the White House and the president have been engaged in a coordinated campaign to convince the public that despite the setbacks and mistakes, the war in Iraq is a critical component of fighting the War on Terror. Making that argument is their plan for the next six weeks until the election. All the while, they’ve been sitting on a report that says that’s flat wrong, a lie and that precisely the opposite is the case.

That’s a cover-up in every meaningful sense of the word, a calculated effort to hide information from and deceive the public.

Back to Glenn Greenwald:

So, a recap of the Iraq war: there were never any WMDs. The proliferation of government death squads and militias in Iraq means that, compared to the Saddam era, human rights have worsened and torture has increased to record levels. Iranian influence has massively increased, as a result of a Shiite fundamentalist government loyal to Tehran replacing the former anti-Iranian regime. We’ve squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. And we have — according to the consensus of our own intelligence community — directly worsened the terrorist problem with our invasion, and continue to worsen it with our ongoing occupation.

How can anyone claim with a straight face that this war was a good idea?

RELATED:  Definitely a bad weekend for Bush.  Not only the NIE report, but his comment on CNN that that history will show that the 2,700 dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq will be viewed as "just a comma"

Oy.