Beating off the rescue party

Bush doesn't hear anything he doesn't want to hear, period!

Beating off the rescue party Salon.com:

Dec. 7, 2006 The Iraq Study Group's report, released Wednesday, calling the situation in that country 'grave and deteriorating' is hardly the first caution that President Bush has received. Two years ago, in December 2004, two frank face-to-face briefings were delivered to him from the field. In the first, the CIA station chief in Baghdad, who had filed an urgent memo the month before titled 'The Expanding Insurgency in Iraq,' was invited to the White House. The CIA officer had written that the insurgency was becoming more 'self-confident' and in Sunni provinces 'largely unchallenged.' His report concluded: 'The ease with which the insurgents move and exist in Baghdad and the Sunni heartland is bolstering their self-confidence further.' He predicted that the United States would suffer more than 2,000 dead. Bush's reaction was to remark about the station chief, 'What is he, some kind of defeatist?' Less than a week after the briefing, the officer was informed he was being reassigned from his post in Baghdad.