The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is preparing to release a report on the intelligence community’s pre-war assessment of what would happen to Iraq post-war today. Public dissemination of the report could occur within the next few weeks.

This latest Senate report is one part of the committee’s work into intelligence community performance and how said intelligence was used by the administration. There are still two additional reports pending; one related to the potential politicization of intelligence by the administration, and one addressing what role the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans played.

A study commissioned by the Pentagon reports that insurgencies like the one taking place in Iraq have about a 10-year life-span before eventually failing.

The study’s authors suggest that the best-case scenario has the Iraqi insurgency going strong for at least three more years, though based on precedence five years is probably the more realistic time-frame.

Of the over 60 post-WWII insurgencies evaluated for the report, it was noted that insurgent movements only succeeded 41% of the time. The balance of the conflicts resulted in defeat for the insurgents, produced an inconclusive outcome, or continues to this day.

The espionage case against Chi Mak, a naturalized U.S. citizen, went to the jury yesterday after prosecutors claimed he took material from PowerParagon – a defense contractor - and gave it to his brother to pass along to Chinese authorities. Mak’s wife, brother and other relatives have been indicted as co-conspirators in a Chinese espionage ring.

Mak’s defense has focused on his apparent “absent-minded professor” persona, his excessive trust in a duplicitous brother, and his being a victim of an overly-zealous Navy investigator. Additionally, the information Mak was alleged to have stolen was also freely available to the Chinese via other, open sources and was insufficiently valuable enough to actually improve Chinese naval capabilities.

Mak was arrested in 2005 after FBI agents stopped his brother and sister-in-law as they were attempting to leave the country for Hong Kong. The investigators testified that they had found three encrypted CDs in the Mak’s luggage that contained sensitive submarine data.