Larry Johnson, formerly of the CIA and the State Dept.’s Office of Counter Terrorism, posts on the NIE over at the Booman Tribune:

Although the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) regarding Iraq and terrorism is still classified (UPDATE: The Key Judgments are now declassified and can be found at this link), the data behind the findings is not and has been publicly available for three years…

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…

Ray Close, formerly the top CIA official in Saudi Arabia, has this to add in the same post:

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?

Well, um… yeah. Seems inescapable. Tragic as it is.