Over two years after Bush launched a deadly and costly war in Iraq under false pretenses, the CIA has come to some important conclusions. According to a new report, the CIA believes the administration should have realized that Iraq would fall apart, but — I hope you’re sitting down — the Bush gang ignored the intelligence with which they disagreed.
A newly released report published by the CIA rebukes the Bush administration for not paying enough attention to prewar intelligence that predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq.
Policymakers worried more about making the case for the war, particularly the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, than planning for the aftermath, the report says. The report was written by a team of four former CIA analysts led by former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr.
“In an ironic twist, the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence (the weapons program), where the analysis was wrong, but apparently paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right,” they write.
You mean the White House cherry-picked the information it wanted to bolster the decisions it had already made? That the administration was warned about Iraq stumbling towards civil war but didn’t take the admonitions seriously?
You don’t say.