Iraq group cites intelligence failures on violence

The Iraq Study Group

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence has failed to understand Iraq's Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militias because of a lack of resources, language skills and experienced staff, a high-level panel said on Wednesday.

The Iraq Study Group said in its report that agencies including the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency have not done enough to map and dissect the insurgency, or to understand it on a national and provincial level.

The group also said the intelligence community's knowledge of the organization, leadership, financing and operations of Shi'ite militias, and their relationship to Iraqi government security forces, has fallen short of what U.S. policy makers need to know.

"While the United States has been able to acquire good and sometimes superb tactical intelligence on al Qaeda in Iraq, our government still does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the role of the militias," the report concluded.

The bipartisan group, which called on the Bush administration to devote "significantly greater" intelligence resources to understanding Iraq's violence, cited a senior commander's estimate that U.S. spying capabilities in Iraq have improved "from 10 percent to 30 percent."

The group also quoted an intelligence analyst as saying that U.S. officials often lack sufficient cultural and language skills to understand what they are told about the violence by native Iraqis.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has fewer than 10 analysts with more than two years' experience in analyzing the insurgency, it said.

Read the rest at the Washington Post

Related Link:
THE FULL REPORT OF THE IRAQ STUDY GROUP at MSNBC (PDF - 160 Pages)