Washington has been on notice for several months now that the president and his party in Congress want to contest the November election on the high ground of national security.  But now it seems there’s a catch: they want that debate — but only if they’re guaranteed it’s not a fully informed debate.

Over the weekend, you’ll remember, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported on leaks about a then-still-classified National Intelligence Estimate which concluded that the war in Iraq was breeding a new generation of terrorists. In response to demands from Congress and the public, the president yielded on Tuesday and OK’d the declassification and release of the report’s “key findings.”

But now it seems that’s not the only report the White House is sitting on.

At a National Press Club briefing Tuesday morning, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed that there was a second NIE, this one dealing solely with the situation in Iraq, that the administration was keeping under wraps until after the November election.

Then on Tuesday evening, White House national security advisor Frances Townsend confirmed that there was another NIE but that it was in its early stages of being produced and wasn’t scheduled to be released until January 2007.

Here, though, it gets a bit more complicated. Some suggest that there are not one but two reports at various stages of completion in the executive branch. But the latest I’ve been able to hear as of Wednesday morning is that the Iraq NIE is being held up by the White House to ensure it comes out after the election, despite the fact that there was a statutory mandate for such a report to be released prior to the election and that the normal time it takes to produce an NIE should have had this one out in October at the latest.

Now, I can see that your head is probably already starting to spin with these references to multiple reports, some labeled “NIE,” some not, each with different dates of scheduled release. And sorting them out is even further complicated by the fact that all of them remain behind some veil of classification. So the officials who know the details can seldom speak about them in any detailed way. It’s even possible that there aren’t two but only one internal government report on Iraq.

But here’s the point, which should cut through all the gobbledygook and confusion: All the information about Iraq and the War on Terror that doesn’t directly compromise sources and methods should be released now, before the election.

The president says he wants the election to be about national security. If there are any Democrats who think it’s going to be about anything else, they’re not only unrealistic, they’re crazy. The U.S. is involved in one big and hot war in Iraq, another smaller but no less consequential war in Afghanistan and a meta-war on terror that everyone seems to agree stretches across the globe. To think this election isn’t going to be about national security is just plain nuts.

But President Bush seems to want to have the debate without the key information on the table. On the campaign trail he’s saying that the war in Iraq is making America safer, that it’s a key part of the global War on Terror. But the intelligence community — the people actually fighting the War on Terror — seem to be telling the president very close to the opposite of what the president is telling the public. And that can’t stand.

To have a real debate on national security — Iraq and the War on Terror — the public needs to know all the facts. The president can disagree with what the intelligence agencies are telling him.  But he shouldn’t be at liberty to cover up what they’re saying. We’ve already been down that road in the build up to the Iraq War.

For the Democrats, this is a case where politics and substance go hand in hand. A debate without the facts is no debate at all. Democrats should be demanding the president come clean and level with the public. We know what he thinks about Iraq. What do our intelligence agencies think is happening? Is Iraq making us safer or less secure? Keeping any of the available information from voters until after the November election just amounts to a cover-up. Democrats should be saying that at every opportunity. And for their country, Republicans should want it too.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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