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LoungeMachine
09-23-2006, 11:47 PM
Iraq war created a terrorist flood, American spymasters warn Bush

Paul Harris in Washington and Peter Beaumont in Baghdad
Sunday September 24, 2006
The Observer


America's spy agencies have concluded that the invasion of Iraq has created a flood of new Islamic terrorists and increased the danger to US interests to a higher level than at any time since the 9/11 attacks.
This grim assessment is provided in a classified intelligence document called the National Intelligence Estimate, large parts of which have been leaked to the New York Times. The report is the largest US intelligence survey of the global terror threat carried out since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Its conclusion will surprise few critics of the Iraq war or US policy against terrorism. It is, however, a sharp contrast to the message often coming out of the White House and provides a far more harrowing assessment of terrorism than a congressional report published last week.

The White House and senior Republicans often say their tough line has made America safer over the past five years. This report indicates that America's spymasters disagree with that opinion, and its findings could embarrass President George Bush in the run-up to November's crucial midterm elections.

The study represents a consensus opinion of 16 different intelligence organisations. Entitled 'Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States', it was completed last April. Its stark warning is that the threat from Islamic terror groups and their jihadi philosophy has spread across the world.

The New York Times quoted one intelligence official as saying the report describes the invasion and subsequent conflict in Iraq as one of the major factors behind this spread. It says the threat from radical Islam does not now come from a tight-knit core of al-Qaeda terrorists commanded from a central organisation or group of leaders, such as those that carried out the 9/11 attacks. Instead jihadi ideas have spread to create a new class of terrorists who are 'self generating' and can create terror cells capable of carrying out an attack without much outside help.

In Iraq, Sunni extremists marked the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan yesterday by killing at least 37 Shias, many of them women, in a bomb attack on people queuing for cooking fuel in Sadr City, a slum in the east of Baghdad. The bomb - planted in a barrel - exploded, detonating the truck and enveloping them in a fireball.

A Sunni extremist group claimed it carried out the attack as a reprisal for murders by Shia death squads.

Student Dhiyaa Ali, 24, ran to help the victims and found bodies and blood everywhere. He said: 'I went into the flames to get anyone left out of the fire. I saw a mother holding her child, both of them burnt and dead.'

Nickdfresh
09-24-2006, 01:02 AM
I think this may be grounds for impeachment.

Spc. Graner
09-24-2006, 01:47 AM
Hold on!

They may start greeting us as liberators any minute now!

You libs are so cynical and you hate America!

Keef
09-24-2006, 09:57 PM
Originally posted by Spc. Graner
Hold on!

They may start greeting us as liberators any minute now!

You libs are so cynical and you hate America!

Ah right. I sometimes forget that.

Nickdfresh
09-25-2006, 08:30 PM
The original article.

September 24, 2006
Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark 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.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The 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.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.

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. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.

“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe,” concludes one, a report titled “9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges.” “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.”

That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. “The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry,” it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says, “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack.”

The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.

In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate’s conclusions in public speeches.

“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For more than two years, there has been 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.

Spy agencies usually produce several national intelligence estimates each year on a variety of subjects. The most controversial of these in recent years was an October 2002 document assessing Iraq’s illicit weapons programs. Several government investigations have discredited that report, and the intelligence community is overhauling how it analyzes data, largely as a result of those investigations.

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.

The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/world/middleeast/24terror.html?_r=5&hp&ex=1159070400&en=003f596f66422cfd&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slog&oref=login) Company

Nickdfresh
09-26-2006, 08:25 PM
NIE says Iraq is 'cause celebre' for jihadists

By Kevin Whitelaw

Posted 9/26/06

Declassified selected portions of a controversial National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism done by the U.S. intelligence community last April say the Iraq conflict has become "the 'cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters of the global jihadist movement."

Facing political pressure, President Bush ordered the director of national intelligence to publish the "key judgments" section of the April 2006 NIE.

The conclusion about Iraq has been offered before by U.S. officials, but its inclusion in an NIE is significant because it is a formal document that represents the consensus opinion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. The abbreviated four-page document offers few details and sheds little light on how the intelligence agencies came to these conclusions or whether any agencies dissented on parts of the estimate.

The classified report became a political football overnight after the New York Times reported over the weekend that the NIE concluded that U.S. actions in Iraq have exacerbated the terrorist threat. Bush said he ordered the release to demonstrate that the estimate was a broader assessment of how the terrorist threat has changed since September 11. The section on Iraq, for instance, also warns that "perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere."

More broadly, the report claims some progress in degrading the leadership of the al Qaeda terrorist network while warning that the threat has become broader and more diverse.

"Activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion," the report says. "We assess that the global jihadist movement is decentralized, lacks a coherent global strategy, and is becoming more diffuse."

The NIE identifies Europe as a primary battleground for many jihadists, particularly several Sunni extremist groups that have allied themselves with al Qaeda. The findings echo what U.S. intelligence officials have been talking about for several years. For example, U.S. News explored the franchising of al Qaeda by focusing on an Algerian affiliate called the Salafist Group for Call and Combat. The report also warns that al Qaeda is trying to exploit the situation in Iraq. It was written before Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who allied himself with al Qaeda, was killed by U.S. forces.

But already, U.S. intelligence agencies were noting that Iraqis were playing an increased role in managing al Qaeda's operations in Iraq.

In some ways, perhaps the most surprising fact is that it took more than four years for the intelligence community to produce a new NIE trying to describe exactly who the enemy is in the ongoing struggle against terrorism. Democrats have also requested that the DNI produce an NIE on Iraq that could be declassified. But several Democrats have accused the Bush administration of delaying its release until after the November elections.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060926/26nie.htm

Nickdfresh
09-26-2006, 08:31 PM
The "Executive Summary" (http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/Declassified_NIE_Key_Judgments.pdf) is available online.