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...