Originally Posted by queequeger
I *did* read it, it's required if you want to know what's NOT true. Look, if we wanted to make it look like the Badr corps controlled the entire southern third of the country, we could. Not going into specifics (which is annoying as hell, for all parties involved) the intelligence business is kind of fluid, in that you get a lot of contradictory evidence. You can see this from any sensationalist or newsworthy attack, everybody and their brother claims to have done it.
The problem is, when al-Qa'ida claims every damned attack in Iraq, we could technically attribute it to them. On a tactical level, we would NEVER assume that someone who claims responsibility IS the actor without extra or collateral info. But, on a strategic level, the lists are given in a way that just about any conclusion can be made if you look for it. While tw here is over reaching about deliberate large scale changes by an administration, picture this:
Your boss tells you, find all the attacks on our troops in the last year, and tell me who did them. When you've got 100 incidents, 60 of which are CLAIMED by AQI, that's the number you give, with a little caveat saying "sorta.' It goes further and further up the chain and in each little report it gets edited re-edited, comments get added and deleted, etc. The problem is, when you're LOOKING for attacks made by al-Qa'ida four steps up the chain, you'll find a lot more than are actually there. So when each person in the chain is looking for AQI attacks, the number gets inflated and inflated.
It's a big problem with big intelligence, but rumor has it (I wouldn't know personally) that it got really bad *about* when Rumsfeld got the keys to the pentagon. Apparently he would go from person to person until someone found the supporting evidence he wanted and give THAT person a promotion. So, every general went from person to person, every colonel did the same, so on and so forth.
Once again I'd like to point out that AQI are bad dudes who've done some major things (like the mosque in Samarra), they do help to destabilize the country, and they do have ties to the 'big' al-Qa'ida. They're just not NEARLY as major as they're made out to be.
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