Well, It's About Time, I wonder who figured this one out? And all along I've been maligning the brain power in the White House. Silly me.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 — Dozens of the American intelligence experts and linguists sent to Iraq to search for illicit weapons have been reassigned to an expanding effort to learn more about the insurgents attacking United States troops, senior government officials said Wednesday.
The shift in the last two weeks appears to reflect a decision that the hunt for insurgents is becoming a more urgent task than the quest for chemical and biological weapons, which has so far proved unsuccessful despite the involvement of hundreds of people in the search.
In recent weeks as many as 40 attacks a day have been conducted against American troops in Iraq, and American commanders have acknowledged that they know relatively little about the attackers.
The question of whether to assign some of the intelligence experts to counterinsurgency has been debated for weeks within the Bush administration. Government officials say the work for now is being carried out informally, with no decision yet on whether to make the reassignment official or permanent.
But they said the switch meant that some of the linguists, intelligence analysts and other experts on the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group were now reporting only to Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, a top official of the Defense Intelligence Agency who heads the survey group.
Previously they reported further up the chain of command to David Kay, the civilian American official who oversees the weapons hunt as a special adviser to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence.
A Defense Department official said the group had been reinforced in recent weeks with "additional assets" focused on counterinsurgency.
