Political Forum - View Single Post - Iraq Civil War denied by the Bush Monkeys

apotropoxy · #1 (**permalink**) 03-01-2006, 05:37 AM

Quote:

Intelligence agencies warned about growing local insurgency in late 2003
By WARREN P. STROBEL and JONATHAN S. LANDAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports.
Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions - not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.
The existence of the top-secret document, which was the subject of a bitter three-month debate among U.S. intelligence agencies, has not been previously disclosed to a wide public audience.
President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and others continued to describe the insurgency as a containable threat, posed mainly by former supporters of Saddam Hussein, criminals and non-Iraqi terrorists - even as the U.S. intelligence community was warning otherwise.
Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, said the October 2003 study was part of a "steady stream" of dozens of intelligence reports warning Bush and his top lieutenants that the insurgency was intensifying and expanding.
"Frankly, senior officials simply weren't ready to pay attention to analysis that didn't conform to their own optimistic scenarios," Hutchings said in a telephone interview.
The office of Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte declined Tuesday to comment for this article.
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13984788.htm

This is the same team of cabbage sniffers who thought we'd be greeted with flowers on the streets of Baghdad, that there was no need to stop the looting, no cause to secure the hundreds of arms depots and that saying "Mission Accomplished" meant that the only remaining task at hand was to gather champagne glasses.