Thursday, October 13, 2005

Report Says White House Ignored C.I.A. on Iraq Chaos

A review by former intelligence officers has concluded that the Bush administration "apparently paid little or no attention" to prewar assessments by the Central Intelligence Agency that warned of major cultural and political obstacles to stability in postwar Iraq.
The unclassified report was completed in July 2004. It appeared publicly for the first time this week in Studies in Intelligence, a quarterly journal, and was first reported Wednesday in USA Today. The journal is published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, which is part of the C.I.A. but operates independently.
The review was conducted by a team led by Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, working under contract for the C.I.A. It acknowledged the deep failures in the agency's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs but said "the analysis was right" on cultural and political issues related to postwar Iraq.

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