Pentagon challenges Rockefeller on Feith hit

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The unanimous committee report made a brief mention of the intelligence work of the No. 3 official, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy. But the report did not criticize Mr. Feith or accuse him of wrongdoing. The bipartisan report, which Mr. Rockefeller approved, said there was no evidence that any policy-maker had pressured CIA analysts to conform intelligence findings to the Pentagon's point of view.

At his post-report press conference, Mr. Rockefeller charged the opposite.

"We've done a little bit of work on the Number-three guy in the Defense Department, Douglas Feith, part of his alleged efforts to run intelligence past the intelligence community altogether ... and was he running private intelligence failure, which is not lawful?" Mr. Rockefeller said Friday at the joint press conference with committee Chairman Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican.

"The committee's report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments," Mr. Rockefeller said.

At issue is a special team Mr. Feith set up after the September 11 attacks to examine any linkage between Saddam Hussein's regime and international terrorists, including Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. Mr. Feith's personnel examined years of intelligence reports on Iraq-al Qaeda contacts, put them into a briefing and delivered it to the CIA, which was compiling a report in 2002 called "Iraqi Support for Terrorism."

Defense officials, who asked not to be named, said yesterday that Mr. Rockefeller's charges against Mr. Feith are not supported by his own bipartisan report.

On this point, the Senate committee report said, "All of the participants in the August 2002 coordination meeting on the September 2002 version of Iraqi Support for Terrorism interviewed by the committee agreed that while some changes were made to the paper as a result of the participation of two office of the under secretary of defense for policy staffers, their presence did not result in changes to their analytical judgments."

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