• The total number of international terrorist incidents, both significant and non-significant, declined until 2002.
• The number of significant incidents increased steadily starting in 1992.
• Most of the significant incidents were caused by radical Islamic extremists.
• 2004 marked the single, largest increase in terrorist activity ever recorded since the CIA started keeping records dating back to 1968.
• The four fold increase in significant terrorist incidents (attacks in which people were killed and wounded) was a direct consequence of the war in Iraq.  All you have to do is look at the attacks recorded and the people killed and wounded in those attacks.  Iraq and India were the big targets in 2004.

Ray Close, who served as the top CIA official in Saudi Arabia, has offered the following on the importance of the current NIE:

No reasonable person can possibly deny that our intervention in Iraq has been an enormous stimulus to terrorist activity worldwide. Efforts by John McCain and others to discount the significance of that factor by pointing out that the attacks on 9/11 occurred before our overthrow of Saddam Hussein is as trivial and irrelevant as they are disingenuous. As someone who devoted his entire career to the intelligence profession, I was shocked and angered to read this in the NY Times this morning: 

"Several of the lawmakers who appeared on Sunday talk shows said they had not seen the classified document . . [the National Intelligence Estimate]. Intelligence reports from American spy agencies are not circulated widely on Capitol Hill, and Congressional officials said neither the House nor the Senate intelligence committees had been formally briefed on the report." 

A National Intelligence Estimate is just exactly what the title says it is. An NIE isn't issued every day. It sometimes takes weeks to write and coordinate. Even the decision to prepare an NIE in the first place is a painstaking one. It is a BIG DEAL, in other words. An NIE is not a single report from a single agency, but represents the considered judgment of the entire intelligence community (16 different agencies, in theory) on a subject deemed to be of vital significance to makers of national security and foreign policy.  

If key members of Congress (like Majority Leader Bill Frist, who claimed ignorance of this report), and neither the House nor the Senate intelligence committees, have seen the document since it was produced in April, then we have to ask ourselves whether the White House and Congress take any serious interest in the most important products of America's enormous (and extremely expensive) intelligence empire. Are we to conclude that the "brains" of the United States Government (presumably those who formulate and carry out national policy) are simply not interested in making use of the best information and advice available to them? That seems to confirm the growing impression that policy is influenced today more by considerations of ideology and political expediency than by painstaking and objective study of the world situation.

Once again we are witnessing the Bush Administration trying to ignore the bad news the intelligence community is obligated to tell the President.  The willful ignorance of President Bush, his advisors, and his Congressional enablers is creating a more dangerous world.  Instead of taking the bull by the horns and confronting the issue, Bush and company are burying their heads in the sand.  Just remember that when we are hit again by a mass casualty attack.