The CIA’s Insurgency

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Essential reading at OpinionJournal: The CIA’s Insurgency.

Yesterday’s CIA leak, of the January 2003 memo, also turns out to be what the spooks call “disinformation.” We’re told that its ballyhooed warning of an insurgency is not among the document’s key findings and occurs only in the very last sentence of its 38 pages. We’re also told there is not a single mention of Zarqawi, the dominant terrorist now in Iraq, or of “the Party of Return,” the name the Baath Party remnants began circulating soon after the fall of Saddam.

The document’s after-thought sentence reads: “In addition, rogue ex-regime elements could forge an alliance with existing terrorist organizations or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare against the new government or coalition forces.” We highlight that phrase about “existing terrorist” groups because critics of the war like to claim that there were no terrorists in Iraq before the war; now we know that in January 2003 even the CIA said there were.

Notably, too, the leakers of this document somehow overlooked the many predictions it made that did not come true. Those include: sectarian violence, seizure of the oil fields in the north by Kurds and in the South by Shiites, a humanitarian and refugee crisis, and the possible use by Saddam of “chemical or biological weapons against his own people and coalition forces.” Worst of all, the document anticipated that the Iraqi police and regular army could be relied upon to provide order in Iraq after the invasion. Deputy Director John McLaughlin personally assured Mr. Bush on this one—which we now know to be a mistake as large as predicting that finding Saddam’s WMD would be a “slam dunk.”

Our point here isn’t to assail everyone at the CIA, which includes thousands of patriots doing their best to protect America. But clearly at senior rungs of the agency there is a culture that has deep policy attachments that have been offended by Mr. Bush, and these officials want him defeated. American voters need to understand this amid this election season. As for Mr. Goss, his task is to tell the Pillars of Langley to shut up—or quit and run for office themselves.

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