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Intelligence agencies warned about growing local insurgency in late 2003

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Wednesday, March 1, 2006

Knight Ridder reports that "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."

This is in stark contrast to public statements made by the Bush administration. In his November 1 radio address President Bush said "Some of the killers behind these attacks are loyalists of the Saddam regime who seek to regain power and who resent Iraq's new freedoms. Others are foreigners who have traveled to Iraq to spread fear and chaos. ... The terrorists and the Baathists hope to weaken our will. Our will cannot be shaken."

In a May 2005 interview Vice President Cheney said "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Accoding to Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, and now diplomat in residence at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, there was a "steady stream" of intelligence reports warning Bush and his administration that the insurgency was intensifying and expanding, including a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, which was completed in October 2003.

Hutchings said that from early 2003 on the intelligence reports reflected that there were "signs of incipient civil war".

"Frankly, senior officials simply weren't ready to pay attention to analysis that didn't conform to their own optimistic scenarios," Hutchings told Knight Ridder.

The office of Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte declined Tuesday to comment on the Knight Ridder article.

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Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

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Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
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