Posted on 11/20/2003 10:53:34 AM PST by Gothmog
Late last month, a top Pentagon official fired off the latest salvo in the politically charged debate about whether there were links between Saddam Hussein's government and the Qaeda terrorist network.
The Oct. 27 memorandum from Douglas J. Feith, under secretary of defense for policy and planning, to the Senate intelligence committee listed 50 points of raw intelligence that, he said, pointed to an operational link between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
The letter itself was highly classified, but its contents were reported over the weekend by The Weekly Standard, a journal with close ties to administration hawks. At a time when Democrats have been crowing about the administration's failure so far to find illicit weapons in Iraq, conservatives have seized on the claim as evidence that, because of its ties to Al Qaeda, Iraq did indeed pose a real danger to the United States.
"An operational relationship between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, as detailed in the memo, would represent a threat the United States could not afford to ignore," The Weekly Standard said in an online report on Wednesday.
Government officials with knowledge of intelligence on Iraq said that the reports cited by Mr. Feith were indeed authentic. But they also said they were not new, that some were not credible and that all had been weighed in the preparation of intelligence reports that concluded that the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda remained ambiguous at best.
"If you don't understand how intelligence works, you could look at this memo and say, `Aha, there was an operational connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda,' " a Pentagon official said Wednesday. "But intelligence is about sorting what is credible from what isn't, and I think the best judgment about Iraq and Al Qaeda is that the jury is still out."
For more than a year, intelligence agencies have reported knowledge of senior-level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda dating back more than a decade, while cautioning that their understanding of the relationship is still evolving.
Some Democrats have become even more dismissive of the claims of prewar ties, and the memo by Mr. Feith does not directly challenge them. But its contents, including information that had not been made public, add new fuel to the feud.
Indeed, parts of the memo support the much stronger case presented by Bush administration officials who have repeatedly cited the ties as a threat to the United States and as a primary justification for the American invasion of Iraq.
Among the 50 reports cited in Mr. Feith's memorandum, perhaps the most sensational is a Czech intelligence service claim that the Sept. 11 hijacker Muhammed Atta met several times in Prague with a former Iraqi intelligence chief, who in 2000 is said to have requested a transfer of funds to Mr. Atta. Yet the C.I.A. has said the meetings remain unconfirmed, as the memo also points out.
With the disclosure of Mr. Feith's memorandum, some conservative commentators have resurrected claims of a link between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks, even though President Bush said in September that he had seen no such evidence.
Mr. Feith, a chief proponent and architect of the war in Iraq, is among a small group of administration officials who have been accused by Democratic critics of using intelligence selectively to support his views, by drawing on raw reports to reach conclusions that differ from those of the intelligence agencies. More than a year before the Iraq war began, Mr. Feith set up an Office of Special Plans, inside of which was a secret team that operated as a kind of parallel intelligence agency with a particular focus on Iraq.
The question of who provided the 16-page, classified memorandum to The Weekly Standard is the subject of a leak investigation, according to government officials.
The memo includes intelligence reporting from a variety of agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Among other reports, it cites several regarding meetings between top Iraqi officials and Osama bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, in 1996 and 1998.
A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to comment on the Feith memorandum. But American officials said that the best assessment of the government's knowledge of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda remains that of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, in his unclassified letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee in October 2002.
In the letter, Mr. Tenet said there was "credible reporting" that Qaeda leaders had sought contacts in Iraq that could help them acquire the capability to use weapons of mass destruction, and that "Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." But it also cautioned that intelligence agencies' understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda "is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability."
USA Today, 11/20/03
CIA will examine raw data on Iraq
By John Diamond, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — CIA Director George Tenet has ordered investigators to substantially widen their internal probe of Iraq intelligence to consider whether the agency missed telltale signs that Iraq had gotten rid of its weapons of mass destruction before the U.S.-led invasion last March.
The probe, which has been conducted by a four-member team of former senior CIA analysts since early this year, was broadened this week. It will now extend into 20 volumes of raw intelligence reports, such as electronic intercepts, spy satellite photos and reports from human sources. Until now, the team had limited its work to a far smaller volume of finished intelligence reports and assessments.
In a probe that parallels investigations by the House and Senate intelligence committees, the team is examining the quality of prewar intelligence that said Saddam Hussein's regime had chemical and biological weapons and a resurgent nuclear weapons program. The alleged weapons were the Bush administration's key stated reason for invading Iraq, but U.S. searchers have failed to find such weapons there since U.S. forces entered Iraq.
The expanded probe was disclosed by two intelligence officials who asked not be named, and was confirmed by Richard Kerr, former CIA deputy director and head of the four-member team. Kerr said in a telephone interview Wednesday, "It's important to figure out, from an intelligence point of view, if we didn't do it well, how could we have done better."
Although Kerr would like to wait until chief U.S. weapons searcher David Kay finishes his work in Iraq sometime next spring or summer, the team has already concluded that no matter how long Kay's teams look, they are unlikely to turn up the vast arsenal U.S. intelligence said was in Iraq before the war. And meanwhile, the clock is ticking on the House and Senate investigations, which are expected to be sharply critical of the CIA and could issue findings long before Kay wraps up his work.
Tenet, who ordered the expanded investigation last week, also wants Kerr's team to see what he regards as an enormous volume of solid information the CIA assembled over the past decade indicating that Iraq had illegal weapons.
The two intelligence officials said a key aim is to look for raw prewar reports indicating that Iraq may have, as it claimed, dismantled its weapons of mass destruction programs. The concern is that CIA analysts discounted or overlooked those reports because of an overriding assumption that Saddam was secretly hoarding an arsenal of banned weapons.
"Not new", the classic Clintonian spin; "this is old news". Okay, so they are "not new". But most people still don't know about them, and moreover, many people seem to think (or pretend to think) that "there's no connection between Saddam and Osama" is some kind of mathematically-proven statement.
that some were not credible
I'm sure that out of some 50 bullet-points in the memo, some are from informants/witnesses who are not credible.
I guess that makes the whole thing false.
and that all had been weighed in the preparation of intelligence reports that concluded that the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda remained ambiguous at best.
Of course it's "ambiguous". Nothing is proven. But why is it that I have to sit there and listen to lefties for months and months repeat the mantra "no connection between Saddam and Osama" (as if it's proven that there's no connection), and then when some evidence comes out indicating that maybe there was, suddenly the goalposts move and the rebuttal is "but it's ambiguous"? If it's agreed to be so ambiguous then one would think the "no connection" people would have to shut the hell up. Ambiguity cuts both ways.
a Pentagon official said Wednesday. "But intelligence is about sorting what is credible from what isn't, and I think the best judgment about Iraq and Al Qaeda is that the jury is still out."
Of course the jury is still out, Mr. Pentagon official. That's what I've been trying to tell the "no connection" people for months on end. But for some reason they all seem to think that "no connection" is the dogmatically true statement. Why would that be?
Indeed, parts of the memo support the much stronger case presented by Bush administration officials who have repeatedly cited the ties as a threat to the United States and as a primary justification for the American invasion of Iraq.
Incidentally, this is bogus. It's not true that the administration was "repeatedly citing ties" between Iraq and Al Qaeda nor that they were citing them as a "primary justification" for the war. They have been extremely reluctant to publicly get behind statements about such ties. The author is trying to set up a straw man.
--George Tenet, on the New York Times
Saddam did not have to have anything to do with 9/11. If he was a partner/trainer/provider to AQ then we had more than enough justification to stomp him out since we would not know what he planned to do next - and iraqis never forget revenge.
You don't know that and neither do I. From everything I've heard it doesn't particularly sound like the 9/11 conspirators would have needed Saddam's help for much of anything, and from a strategic standpoint even if Saddam did have ties to Al Qaeda generally it would have been smarter of Saddam to keep himself out of any 9/11-conspiracy "loops", but nevertheless, as to your axiomatic declaration "Saddam did not have to have anything to do with 9/11", you simply don't know that. You have no idea what you're talking about. You have no basis whatsoever for making such a statement.
Tenet confirmed the AQ-Iraqi linkage 'last year'
The idiot AlGore, for one.
Wonder if they refer to left-of-center publications as having "close ties to America's enemies".
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