Intelligence?

A grim assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

To many of us, this report is not news at all. For years, many of us have been talking about the impact that will be made by tens of thousands of civilan deaths in Iraq. Nearly 7,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in just the past two months, according to a UN report just released.

I really hope in the coming days that we will see one or more members of the White House press corps force Bush to address this official report. Come on Helen. Where are you when we need you badly?




National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence.

This intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

For more than two years, there has been major tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.




I have been reading the right wing blogs on this issue. They are in a tizzy trying to justify this official damaging assessment. Their reasoning is so stupid, I won’t even take the time to repeat it. If you want to read a typical argument against the report, you can find one here.

Perhaps the one argument that does have legs, which nobody seems to be mentioning, are past reports that have come out of this collective. Specifically, I refer to the one produced in October of 2002. A document assessing Iraq’s illicit weapons programs (a.k.a. WMD). This was one of the major documents that fueled Bush’s reasoning to invade Iraq in the first place.