The AP Goes Over the Top for the Democrats

From Powerline:

The administration declassified and released the three-page "key judgments" of the National Intelligence Estimate; we linked to it earlier today. The document, taken as a whole, shows that the leaks given to the New York Times and Washington Post were so incomplete and unrepresentative as to be wildly misleading, as were the stories those papers wrote based on the leaks.

At this morning's press conference, the AP's Jennifer Loven, one of the most partisan reporters in that highly partisan stable, asked a tendentious question about the NIE, in response to which President Bush announced that he had ordered the report's conclusions declassified so that the American people can read it for themselves and draw their own conclusions.
...
The Associated Press is apparently relying on the assumption that hardly anyone will read the report's conclusions. Here are a few significant items that, with just one exception, Loven and her colleague didn't see fit to mention:

...
The NIE is very much a mixed bag, with a lot of on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand. But, given the assessments noted above, which are not only positive but also reinforce the importance of the goals the Bush administration is pursuing--victory in Iraq and reform, eventually, in the Arab world--the AP's characterization of the report as "bleak" is ridiculous, and its claim that "[v]irtually all assessments of the current situation were bad news" is simply false.

Beyond the misreporting of the NIE, what strikes me most about it is what a useless document it is. It is couched in such generalities that I don't see what use the President, or anyone else, could make of it for policy-making purposes. I would hope that if we saw the whole report, there would be substance that is not reflected in the "key judgments." If not, if I were President, I would send it back to the agencies it came from with a request to tell me something I didn't already know.