No progress. The NYT's White House reporter David Sanger provides a devastating report sourced by a "former senior official with the just dissolved" CPA, who says US forces and intelligence have made not a dent in the overall number of Ba'athists and foreign Jihadist insurgents in Iraq.

Moreover, said the former senior official, who has spent more than a year in Iraq and had access to the highest-level intelligence, American officials had found it ``almost impossible to penetrate'' the network organized by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is believed responsible for many of the suicide bombings that have killed both American troops and Iraqis.

The official also said that over the last year, both Iran and Syria had stepped up their activity in Iraq, and that the Iranians might have been financing Moktada al-Sadr, the young radical cleric whom the Bush administration first promised to capture or kill, then decided had to be spared to avoid urban warfare in Najaf, his stronghold. The Iranians have ``become more active over time, and not helpful,'' the official said, though he said intelligence indicated that far more foreign fighters were coming over the border from Syria than from Iran.

Taken together, the description of the paucity of intelligence still available to the 138,000 American troops in Iraq and the assessment of how few inroads have been made at reducing the insurgency sounded a very different note from the optimistic-sounding messages that President Bush has been sending all week about the prospects of the new Iraqi government.

Sanger later indicates that this former senior administration official was "speaking in Washington on condition of anonymity at the request of the White House."

How useful could the Pentagon funded, INC-run Information Collection Program have been if it was unable to begin to enable US forces to have even a solid understanding of who they are fighting?

Posted by Laura at July 2, 2004 12:40 AM