I finally got around to reading the 4 page Declassified NIE "ìTrends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States from April 2006. Meh.
NIEs "express the coordinated judgments of the US Intelligence Community made up of 16 intelligence agencies, and thus represent the most authoritative assessment of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) with respect to a particular national security issue." They take a while to prepare. They are supposed to be a big deal.
I know this is only the 4 page summary but I'm amazed at how useless and obvious this one is. There are more jihadists, al Qaida is a threat both inside and outside the US and is decentralized and becoming moreso. If the Iraq JIhad is successful it will inspire more fighters. This is intelligence? Sound like common sense.
On page 2 it suggests that to fight the spread of the movement we'll have to do more than capture or kill terrorist leaders and that we should point out that the fundamentalist society the jihadists want isn't what most Muslims want. Shocker.
"We judge that most jihadist groups--both well-known and newly formed--will use improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks focused primarily on soft targets to implement their asymmetric warfare strategy, and that they will attempt to conduct sustained terrorist attacks in urban environments. Fighters with experience in Iraq are a potential source of leadership for jihadists pursuing these tactics." Oh come on. They'll continue to fight us with IEDs? We need an NIE for this?
And it ends with "We judge that groups of all stripes will increasingly use the Internet to communicate, propagandize, recruit, train, and obtain logistical and financial support." So, the terrorists, like everyone else, will use the fastest growing communications mechanisms in the world. How insightful.
I remember both sides trying to pick individual sentences out of this to prove their points. What a joke.
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