NEW STUDY SHOWS BUSH AND ARMY BURIED FAULTY PLANS FOR IRAQ WAR

Not that anyone needs further proof that there was a rush to get us into war with Iraq by the Bush administration and the Pentagon, but now the New York Times on Monday, Feburary 11 is reporting a study by the Rand Corporation was buried by the Bush White House and the Pentagon even though the report was not classified.

The Iraq war has been going on now longer than it took the United States to fight World War II.

For all the chest-thumping President Bush, General Petraeus and FOX NEWS have been doing about the success of the "surge," there are mounting signs violence in Iraq as on the upswing.

Two bombs went off Monday in Baghdad and there were a series of car bombing over the weekend that left scores of Iraqi citizens dead as well as the death of FIVE members of the United States military.

The mainstream press continues to focus entirely on the upcoming election in the United States and the Iraq War is no longer a topic in both the electronic and print media.

That is why my blog, CORKSPHERE, http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ has become so popular not only in the United States but all across the world. The blog is devoted to telling the TRUTH about what is happening in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.



Army Buried Study Faulting Iraq Planning

http://tinyurl.com/yvq3p5

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON — The Army is accustomed to protecting classified information. But when it comes to the planning for the Iraq war, even an unclassified assessment can acquire the status of a state secret.

That is what happened to a detailed study of the planning for postwar Iraq prepared for the Army by the RAND Corporation, a federally financed center that conducts research for the military.

After 18 months of research, RAND submitted a report in the summer of 2005 called “Rebuilding Iraq.” RAND researchers provided an unclassified version of the report along with a secret one, hoping that its publication would contribute to the public debate on how to prepare for future conflicts.

But the study’s wide-ranging critique of the White House, the Defense Department and other government agencies was a concern for Army generals, and the Army has sought to keep the report under lock and key.

A review of the lengthy report — a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times — shows that it identified problems with nearly every organization that had a role in planning the war. That assessment parallels the verdicts of numerous former officials and independent analysts.

The study chided President Bush — and by implication Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser when the war was planned — as having failed to resolve differences among rival agencies. “Throughout the planning process, tensions between the Defense Department and the State Department were never mediated by the president or his staff,” it said.

The Defense Department led by Donald H. Rumsfeld was given the lead in overseeing the postwar period in Iraq despite its “lack of capacity for civilian reconstruction planning and execution.”

The State Department led by Colin L. Powell produced a voluminous study on the future of Iraq that identified important issues but was of “uneven quality” and “did not constitute an actionable plan.”

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