Latest Prewar Iraq Intelligence Report Awaits Approval

[sabra]

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/blogs/news_blog/070508/latest_prewar_iraq_intelligenc.htm

A report evaluating the U.S. intelligence community's prewar assessments of postwar Iraq is set to be approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee as early as this afternoon and could be released to the public in the coming weeks.

In his new book, former CIA Director George Tenet offered a preview of what the committee will find. For example, Tenet quoted a January 2003 report by the National Intelligence Council that offered this warning: "Iraqi political culture is so imbued with norms alien to the democratic experience . . . that it may resist the most vigorous and prolonged democratic treatments."

The Senate panel's report is part of a larger inquiry into the quality of U.S. intelligence community's work on Iraq before the invasion -- and how the Bush administration used that intelligence -- that has been dragging on for almost four years. Two more reports are still pending, including one that compares how Bush administration officials characterized the intelligence in making their case for war with the actual intelligence reports.

The final piece was supposed to look at the activities of the Office of Special Plans -- a controversial Pentagon office created by former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith -- that combed raw intelligence files to bolster the administration's arguments that Iraq was an impending threat. But that report may be scrapped because his office was already the subject of a Pentagon inspector general inquiry.

[EstimatedProphet]

1. No!

"Iraqi political culture is so imbued with norms alien to the democratic experience . . . that it may resist the most vigorous and prolonged democratic treatments."

But freedom is on the march!