Report: Intel predicted current Iraq problems

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Tja....... de bewijzen blijven komen... en worden weer even arrogant afgewezen en genegeerd... griezelige ontwikkelingen...

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WASHINGTON — Intelligence officials told the Bush administration and Congress two months before the war in Iraq began that toppling Saddam Hussein could produce internal violence and might strengthen Islamist terrorists inside and outside occupied Iraq, according to documents released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The documents also predicted that Iranian leaders would try to intervene in post-war Iraq, and warned that dismantling the Iraqi army, police and security forces would make it harder to provide safety, according to the documents.
Fighting between Sunni and Shiite Muslims has destabilized much of post-war Iraq, and the United States has sent about 28,000 extra troops there as part of a security plan aimed at stopping insurgents.
The assessments were prepared by the National Intelligence Council, a CIA-led group that provides Congress and the White House with specific intelligence analysis bearing on policy decisions. They were declassified at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Committee Democrats said the accurate intelligence assessments provided the administration with appropriate warning of the violence now occurring in Iraq. The intelligence analyses also urged prewar diplomacy involving Iraq's neighbors, particularly Iran, and argued for rapid action to prevent religious and ethnic turmoil, the Democrats said.
"The intelligence community gave the administration plenty of warning about the difficulties we would face if the decision was made to go to war," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the committee's chairman.
"Sadly, the administration's refusal to heed these dire warnings — and worse, to plan for them — had led to tragic consequences for which our nation is paying a terrible price," Rockefeller said.
Some committee Republicans challenged that conclusion, saying the pre-war estimates didn't focus on the current insurgency as a possible post-war development. Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., said the report was "hindsight" that had become "too embroiled in politics and partisanship" to be "accurate and meaningful."
The report, Bond said, leaves the false impression "that the intelligence community told policymakers before the war that we were going to run into the things we ran into."
Instead, he said, policy analysts gave lawmakers a "whole list of things that might happen" and "a parade of horribles."
"Nobody (on the committee) challenged them at the time," said Bond, the committee's vice chairman.
Bond, the committee's vice chairman, also criticized Rockefeller and the committee's Democratic majority for listing 81 White House, Pentagon, State Department and CIA officials who had received the pre-war assessments in January 2003.
Bond called this "pounding on" lower-level officers a "troubling departure" from "wise" committee precedent that named only department heads or Cabinet-level officials.
The assessments were released as part of an ongoing committee study of intelligence related to the war in Iraq.Among the Senate report's key findings:
•The intelligence community accurately predicted that creating a democratic government in Iraq would be a long and hard process.
•Pre-war predictions included that al-Qaeda would use the war to increase attacks on U.S. forces within Iraq.
•That the intelligence community had warned before the war began that it would "boost political Islam" and lead to an increase in terrorist funding.
The Senate report also found areas in which the pre-war intelligence had missed the mark. One assessment, for instance, held that after an "initial spike," the terrorist threat from post-war Iraq would probably decline over three to five years. During a speech at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday, President Bush argued that Iraq remains a key center of al-Qaeda threats.
At the White House on Thursday, Bush shrugged off a question about the upcoming report.
"Going into Iraq, we were warned about a lot of things, some of which happened, some of which didn't happen," Bush said.
"And obviously, as I made a decision I weighed the risks and rewards of any decision."

By Richard Willing, USA TODAY
May 25, 2007

Voor het rapport (229 blz'n) zie: http://intelligence.senate.gov/prewar.pdf