Hiding outside Bin Laden's apartment making hangup calls

Frances Fragos Townsend held the top administration press conference on the NIE today, and take a look at how much the language has changed.

Q -- the President was warned before the war that this was actually going to help al Qaeda gain influence. And now you have a report suggesting maybe it has gained influence from the war in Iraq. Isn't that something that the President ignored?

MS. TOWNSEND: But you're assuming it's a zero-sum game, which is what I don't understand. The fact is we were harassing them in Afghanistan, we're harassing them in Iraq, we're harassing them in other ways, non-militarily, around the world. And the answer is, every time you poke the hornet's nest they are bound to come back and push back on you. That doesn't suggest to me that we shouldn't be doing it. It suggests -- you hardly need to be warned that they're going to use this for propaganda purposes. They're going to.

We're no longer "defeating Al Qaeda", or "fighting Al Qaeda," or even "got them on the run." Our current policy is to "harrass" them, to "poke" them with a stick.