Why is this classified. What is Bush trying to hide. The Truth?
Iraq war spawns terror
Correspondents in Washington
September 25, 2006
A CLASSIFIED US intelligence report has found that the Iraq war has spawned a new generation of Islamic extremists and that the overall terrorist threat to the West has grown since the 9/11 attacks.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by US intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 spy services inside the US Government.
The 30-page assessment attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fuelling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released last week by the House Intelligence Committee, officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment told The New York Times.
Called Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States, it says Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has spread across the globe, the newspaper said.
The findings contained in the National Intelligence Estimate state that the war in Iraq has become the primary recruitment vehicle for Islamic extremists, whose numbers are increasing faster than the US and its allies are eliminating the threat. National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents the intelligence community produces on a specific threat, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all the spy agencies, the New York Times report said.
The report avoids specific judgments about the likelihood of terrorists striking on US soil, but concludes that the overall terror threat has increased since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
In a series of recent speeches to mark the fifth anniversary of the attacks, US President George W. Bush has outlined successes in the US war on terror, and argued that Iraq was key to defeating terrorists around the world.
But rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counter-terrorism struggle, the report concludes that the situation in Iraq has worsened the US position, officials told The Washington Post. The National Intelligence Estimate cites the "centrality" of the US invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda, the paper said.
"It's a very candid assessment," one intelligence official told the paper. "It's stating the obvious."
Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalised until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to The New York Times, which broke the story after interviewing more than a dozen US government officials and outside experts. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration, the paper said.
It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticises specific policies, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.
The Post said that although intelligence officials agreed that the US had seriously damaged al-Qa'ida and disrupted its ability to plan and direct major operations, radical Islamic networks had spread and decentralised.
Many of the new cells, the estimate concludes, have no connection to any central structure and arose independently. They communicate only among themselves and derive their inspiration, ideology and tactics from the more than 5000 radical Islamic websites.
They spread the message that the Iraq war is a Western attempt to conquer Islam by occupying Iraq to establish a permanent presence in the Middle East.
They also distribute increasingly frequent and sophisticated messages from al-Qa'ida leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging disaffected Muslims to take up arms against the "crusaders" on behalf of Iraq.
The intelligence estimate does not offer policy prescriptions.
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