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Senate Report: US Intel Warned That Iran, al-Qaida Could Gain With Iraq Invasion    [

    CIA Warned of Risks of War in the Mideast
    By Lisa Myers and Robert Windrem
    NBC News

    Friday 25 May 2007

Pre-war reports say agency predicted dangers of toppling Saddam's regime.

    In a move sure to raise even more questions about the decision to go to war with Iraq, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will on Friday release selected portions of pre-war intelligence in which the CIA warned the administration of the risk and consequences of a conflict in the Middle East.

    Among other things, the 40-page Senate report reveals that two intelligence assessments before the war accurately predicted that toppling Saddam could lead to a dangerous period of internal violence and provide a boost to terrorists. But those warnings were seemingly ignored.

    In January 2003, two months before the invasion, the intelligence community's think tank - the National Intelligence Council - issued an assessment warning that after Saddam was toppled, there was "a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other and that rogue Saddam loyalists would wage guerilla warfare either by themselves or in alliance with terrorists."

    It also warned that "many angry young recruits" would fuel the rank of Islamic extremists and "Iraqi political culture is so embued with mores (opposed) to the democratic experience ... that it may resist the most rigorous and prolonged democratic tutorials."

    None of those warnings were reflected in the administration's predictions about the war.

    In fact, Vice President Cheney stated the day before the war, "Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."

    A second assessment weeks before the invasion warned that the war also could be "exploited by terrorists and extremists outside Iraq."

    The same assessment added, "Iraqi patience with an extended U.S. presence after an overwhelming victory would be short," and said "humanitarian conditions in many parts of Iraq would probably not understand that the Coalition wartime logistic pipeline would require time to reorient its mission to humanitarian aid."

    Both assessments were given to the White House and to congressional intelligence committees.

    Even More Warnings

    And according to the Former CIA Director George Tenet's new book, "At the Center of the Storm," the reports to be released Friday were not the only ones out there.

    One of Tenet's clearest arguments regarding the administration's dismissal of all but the rosiest assessments of post-war Iraq comes in his description of a White House meeting in September 2002. There, a briefing book on the Iraq war was laid out for policy makers.

    "Near the back of the book, Tab 'P', was a paper the CIA analysts had prepared three weeks earlier," Tenet writes. "Dated August 13, 2002, it was titled, 'The Perfect Storm: Planning for the Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq.' It provided worse case scenarios:

    "The United States will face negative consequences with Iraq, the region and beyond which would include:

• Anarchy and the territorial breakup of Iraq;
• Region-threatening instability in key Arab states;
• A surge of global terrorism against US interests fueled by (militant) Islamism;
• Major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic Alliance."

    "These should have been very sobering reports," says Michael O'Hanlon, military analyst at the Brookings Institution. "The administration should have taken them very serious in preparing plans for a difficult post-Saddam period. And yet the administration did not do so."

    William Harlow, part of Tenet's senior intelligence staff and co-author with Tenet on his book, added: "Although the intelligence got the WMD case in Iraq wrong, it got the dangers of a post-invasion Iraq quite right. They raised serious questions about what would face U.S. troops in a post invasion Iraq. The intelligence laid out a number of issues of concern. It's unclear if administration officials paid any attention to those concerns."

    It is likely that Democrats and Republicans on the Hill will question how the administration could have predicted a short, easy war given these warnings and why it has taken more four years for them to surface.

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    Senate Report: US Intel Warned That Iran, al-Qaida Could Gain With Iraq Invasion
    7 News Boston

    Wednesday 23 May 2007

    Washington - U.S. intelligence agencies warned senior members of the Bush administration in early 2003 that invading Iraq could create instability that would give Iran and al-Qaida new opportunities to expand their influence, according to an upcoming Senate report.

    Officials familiar with the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation also say analysts warned against U.S. domination in the region, which could increase extremist recruiting. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the report's declassification is not finished. It could be made public as soon as this week.

    The committee also found that the warnings predicting what would happen after the U.S.-led invasion were circulated widely in government, including to the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President. It wasn't clear whether President Bush was briefed.

    A National Security Council spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday evening.

    The report comes as the administration is facing renewed criticism for failing to execute adequate post-invasion plans to stabilize Iraq after Saddam Hussein was toppled. Meanwhile, the White House has been trying to make the case that Iraq cannot be abandoned.

    The committee's findings are the latest chapter in its four-year investigation into the prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq. An earlier volume, completed and released in 2004, was highly critical of the intelligence community and then-CIA Director George Tenet.

    That 511-page document found widespread problems throughout U.S. spy agencies and said the intelligence community engaged in "group think" by failing to challenge the assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Senators also found that analysts failed to explain their uncertainties to policymakers.

    Yet, in predicting the effects of the U.S. invasion, the committee now finds that U.S. analysts appear to have largely been on the mark.

    A former intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the decision to go to war had been made months before the 2003 papers were drafted and analysts had no delusions that they were going to head off military action. Rather, the official said, they hoped their warnings would be considered in the planning.

    Since the release of his memoir several weeks ago, Tenet has been criticized anew for not doing more to warn Bush about the shaky Iraq intelligence and the consequences of invading.

    Yet his book provided a glimpse of some of the prewar warnings about the consequences of invading Iraq.

    For instance, he discusses a paper prepared for a Camp David meeting with the president in September 2002 entitled, "The Perfect Storm: The Negative Consequences for Invading Iraq." Tenet called the paper a list of "worst-case scenarios," which included anarchy and territorial breakup of Iraq and a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests, fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States.

    He also notes that, in an early 2003 intelligence paper, analysts warned that "a post-Saddam authority would face a deeply divided society with a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other, unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so."

    The paper, which is believed to figure in the Senate investigation, also noted that Iraq's long history of foreign occupation means that it has a deep dislike of occupying forces.

    Since 2003, the Senate committee - led by Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and now Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. - has been trudging through its investigation of what went wrong, frequently slowed by politics.

    Last fall, the committee released new chapters on what was learned after the invasion about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its links to terrorism and how information from an advocacy group, the Iraqi National Congress, crept into U.S. intelligence reporting.

    While the first phase of its report was supported unanimously just before the 2004 presidential elections, the newer findings on the intelligence community's predictions about postwar Iraq have drawn dissent from Republicans. Details on the committee's vote have not yet been released.