-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 7, 2007 11:15:50 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Inventing the Al Qaeda Connection in Iraq
Pentagon probe fills in blanks
on Iraq war groundwork
A memo calling for progress on linking Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein
marked the beginnings of Feith's project.
By Peter Spiegel
LA Times, April 6, 2007
DOUGLAS J. FEITH
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-
feith6apr06,0,6994322.story?coll=la-home-headlines
WASHINGTON — Just four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, then-
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz dashed off a memo to a
senior Pentagon colleague, demanding action to identify connections
between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda.
"We don't seem to be making much progress pulling together
intelligence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Wolfowitz wrote
in the Jan. 22, 2002, memo to Douglas J. Feith, the department's
No. 3 official.
Using Pentagon jargon for the secretary of Defense, Donald H.
Rumsfeld, he added: "We owe SecDef some analysis of this subject.
Please give me a recommendation on how best to proceed. Appreciate
the short turn-around."
Wolfowitz's memo, released Thursday, is included in a recently
declassified report by the Pentagon's inspector general. The memo
marked the beginnings of what would become a controversial yearlong
Pentagon project supervised by Feith to convince the most senior
members of the Bush administration that Hussein and Al Qaeda were
linked — a conclusion that was hotly disputed by U.S. intelligence
agencies at the time and has been discredited in the years since.
In excerpts released in February, Thomas F. Gimble, the acting
inspector general of the Pentagon, criticized the project as an
alternative intelligence assessment that was improper. However,
Gimble said, the operation was not illegal or unauthorized, because
Pentagon directives allowed Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to assign the work.
Many of the activities of the intelligence unit Feith headed are
now well-known. But the release of the full inspector general's
report provides more detail about how a group of Pentagon officials
and on-loan intelligence analysts were able to shunt aside
contradictory reports and convince top administration officials
that they had powerful evidence of connections between Hussein's
regime and Al Qaeda. The 121-page report was released by Sen. Carl
Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,
and is posted on the senator's website, levin.senate.gov/.
Feith has said his project was an appropriate, rigorous effort to
question assumptions made by U.S. intelligence agencies. On a
website Feith set up in response to the inspector general's report,
http://www.dougfeith.com/ , he states: "This IG report controversy
is, in essence, a debate over whether the CIA should be protected
against criticism by policy officials." (Emphasis is his.)
The current Defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, has disavowed
Feith's work, saying in his confirmation hearings and in other
public statements that he believes all intelligence analysis should
be left to the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which are
subject to congressional oversight.
Still, Feith's successor, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric
S. Edelman, sent the inspector general a 52-page defense of Feith's
project.
In the critique, released with the report, Edelman said that all
the activities labeled as "inappropriate" were authorized by
Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld, and that the inspector general's
discouragement of such outside analysis would have a "dampening
effect" on future efforts to challenge intelligence assessments.
"Bipartisan reports and studies by various commissions and
congressional committees since the 9/11 attacks have stressed the
need for vigorous debate, hard questions and alternative thinking
of the sort that motivated the work reviewed in this project,"
Edelman said.
In making its case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush
administration cited evidence that Hussein was stockpiling weapons
of mass destruction. An important secondary reason was the belief
in connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Though the CIA has been
criticized for erroneously gauging Iraq's weapons programs, its
assessment of Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda proved more accurate.
The report highlights how much credence the Feith group gave to a
purported meeting in April 2001 in Prague, Czech Republic, between
Mohamed Atta — the lead Sept. 11 hijacker — and Ahmad Khalil
Ibrahim Samir Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer. Briefings that
Feith's office gave to senior officials, including Rumsfeld and
then-CIA Director George J. Tenet, listed such a meeting on a list
of "known contacts" between Iraqis and the terrorist organization,
according to the report.
The report of a meeting, based on a single source who was in
contact with Czech intelligence, was widely questioned by U.S.
intelligence agencies at the time and was never substantiated.
The Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA each "published reports
that disavowed any 'mature, symbiotic' cooperation between Iraq and
Al Qaeda," the inspector general's report found. "The intelligence
community was united in its assessment that the intelligence on the
alleged meeting between Mohammed Atta and al-Ani was at least
contradictory, but by no means a 'known contact.' "
The report also said Feith tailored his briefings to his audiences:
There were at least three versions of the slides he used in
different sessions with senior officials.
His Aug. 15, 2002, briefing for Tenet, for instance, omitted a
slide titled "Fundamental Problems With How Intelligence Community
Is Assessing Information," which was highly critical of the CIA.
The same slide was included, however, when Feith's office briefed
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then the vice president's chief of staff,
and Stephen Hadley, then deputy national security advisor.
The report said Feith's criticism of the CIA "undercuts the
intelligence community," pointing to Vice President Dick Cheney's
validation of the material as "your best source of information" on
links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
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