http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-10-24-insurgence-intel_x.htm....As the insurgency has intensified, so has the scrutiny of the White House over warnings it received before the war that predicted the instability. An examination of prewar intelligence on the possibility of postwar violence and of the administration's response shows:
• Military and civilian intelligence agencies repeatedly warned prior to the invasion that Iraqi insurgent forces were preparing to fight and that their ranks would grow as other Iraqis came to resent the U.S. occupation and organize guerrilla attacks.
• The war plan put together by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Army Gen. Tommy Franks discounted these warnings. Rumsfeld and Franks anticipated surrender by Iraqi ground forces and a warm welcome from civilians.
• The insurgency began not after the end of major combat in May 2003 but at the beginning of the war, yet Pentagon officials were slow to identify the enemy and to grasp how serious a threat the guerrilla attacks posed
.....Two reports by the National Intelligence Council, a group of senior analysts that pools assessments from across the nation's intelligence community, warned Bush in January 2003, two months before the invasion, that the conflict could spark factional violence and an anti-U.S. insurgency, the official said. One of the reports said the U.S.-led occupation could "increase popular sympathy for terrorist objectives." Similarly sober warnings by the CIA went to senior administration officials and Congress as part of daily intelligence summaries, the intelligence official said.
"What they can't deny is that their own intelligence community warned them of this," says Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an adviser to the Kerry campaign. In at least some cases, though, warnings of a potential insurgency were just one part of much longer classified assessments covering many threats.