One of the most surprising things that Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense and State Department official and RAND researcher who leaked the Pentagon Papers (the 47-volume, top-secret, classified study of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam) to The New York Times in 1971, has said is that the documents didn't actually reveal much about Vietnam that the American populace didn't already know. The classified documents merely confirmed the belief held by many Americans that Vietnam was a war without end. The real "secret," writes Ellsberg in his memoirs, was the fact that Presidents Truman through Nixon had been privy to intelligence that supported this growing common sense, and yet they had blatantly rejected it.

Thirty-five years later, Ellsberg's insights seem especially resonant. Last week, when findings from the National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" were leaked to the press, President Bush expectedly cried foul. Specifically, Bush took issue with the emphasis on the report's conclusion that the war in Iraq is fueling, rather than curtailing, jihadist terrorism. This was, he said, a deliberate and politically motivated distortion of the full report, which, because it was classified, he could not disclose. However, on Sept. 26, under pressure from Congress and the press, he did declassify three-and-a-half pages of the 30-page study. Though only a portion of the full document, these pages contain almost the complete summary of the report's "key judgments" and all of its conclusions on Iraq. There are those in Congress who, like the president, would have us believe that all classified information is so secret that its release puts our nation at risk and fuels the cause of our enemies. If this were true, then perhaps our only solace on the way to national demise would be the juicy and revelatory reading experience that such dangerous information would offer to the American public. But, alas, anyone who has read the declassified portions of the National Intelligence Estimate has found that it contains no shocking details or surprising conclusions. That the war in Iraq has become a "'cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement" is not exactly news. If anything, the report's release has delivered some version of official poetic justice to Howard Dean, who was widely critiqued for espousing exactly this common sense in 2003 and is now reenergized about the prospects of a Democratic takeover of Congress in November.

In a similar way, the fallout over the National Intelligence Estimate has further fueled the causes of those who fought the excesses of presidential powers in the Nixon era. Many are once again taking up their pens in an effort to curb the abuses of the Bush administration. In addition to Ellsberg's article in the current issue of Harper's, in which he argues the need for government officials to make public classified material on U.S. policy toward Iran in order to preempt a full-scale war, there is the much anticipated book by Bob Woodward, most famous for his exposure of Watergate in 1973. State of Denial, which hit the shelves on Saturday and promises to be a best-seller, details the internal debates in the Bush administration over the war in Iraq. Blatantly threatened by the book, presidential representatives have tried to trivialize its findings. White House press secretary Tony Snow said, "Look, this is a war, and you are going to have a lot of really smart people with completely different opinions."

Tony Snow is right. Like the bulk of classified and internal information, the "news" that Woodward has uncovered from high-level debates will come as no surprise to most Americans. But what Woodward does highlight (along with Michael Isikoff's and David Corn's recently published book Hubris) is the fact that Bush hasn't changed his strategy in light of these debates. As Ellsberg realized in his reading of the Pentagon Papers, the real scandal is that presidents-and Bush is no exception-often consider themselves above and beyond the dialogue taking place in the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and other executive agencies. Like his predecessors, Bush apparently follows his gut instincts when it comes to foreign policy. If that's the case, we may have to wait for the next presidential memoir to gain some insight into the ongoing story of the gap between American common sense and high-level government studies on the one hand and executive hubris on the other.

The author is a Ph.D. candidate in GSAS. She is working on a project about State Department officers in the Cold War.