(2006-09-25) — A newly-leaked top-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from April 2006 reveals that America’s 16 spy agencies have finally discovered that terrorists are created by attempts to defeat terrorists.

The report concludes that recent global terrorism by Islamic fanatics was “spawned by the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, rather than by evil, wealthy men bent on ruling the world with their hateful, pseudo-religious ideology.”

More than a dozen members of the intelligence community were interviewed for this story, but each insisted on anonymity because, as one senior CIA official said, “folks in the intel business are supposed to keep their mouths shut about classified reports, and we’d like to continue getting our fat government paychecks for essentially playing a guessing game and writing memos.”

The April NIE is a sequel to the pre-war intelligence estimate that documented Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of chemical weapons and his clandestine nuclear program, so it is considered highly credible by those who oppose the Bush administration’s current Iraq policy.

“Bush operates on the flawed assumption that you can defeat terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere by killing them,” said one unnamed expert familiar with the report, “but, in fact, we’ve learned that killing them actually creates them. It’s like that broomstick scene from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice‘. You chop one in half and then you’ve got two crazy animated broomsticks.”

The source said that CIA decryption analysts are now convinced that “the solution to stopping global terrorism lies in finding the ’secret word’ to break the spell and to turn these anti-Western, anti-Semitic, blood-thirsty religious fanatics into our partners in peace.”

The intelligence sources contacted for this story all refused to comment on the genesis of the terrorists who repeatedly attacked civilian and military targets in the decades leading up to the second Iraq war.

“That’s not relevant to the current debate,” said one analyst. “It’s important that we not become distracted by historical perspective.”