http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46460-2003Nov15?language=pri... http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54452-2003Nov17?language=pri... http://www.msnbc.com/news/995706.asp?0cv=KB10 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/20/politics/20MEMO.html?pagewanted=prin... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63538-2003Nov19.html http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/001763.php http://slate.msn.com/id/2092180 /
The Case of the Misunderstood Memo
The Feith "annex" highlights the Bush administration's misuse of intelligence material.
ALSO:
The only intelligence “product” of this office that has surfaced thus far is an assessment of previous intelligence reports about links between Iraq and al Qaeda. The substance of that product, originally a Power Point briefing, was contained in a Defense Department memo leaked to the Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes last winter. Hayes reported that Under Secretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith sent the memo to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in October 2003. It documented references to contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda as published in intelligence reports dating back to the first Gulf War.
Writing in Sunday’s Washington Post, Dana Priest reported that the briefing was the product of two analysts working inside the “Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group” set up shortly after 9/11. The two-person effort to review past intelligence reporting on such contact wrapped up sometime in mid-2002. Shortly thereafter, their briefing became a “traveling road show.” Secretary Rumsfeld has recalled that his staff recommended the briefing to him; he says that two people briefed him and he then sent them over to see Tenet.
In his Senate testimony, Tenet told Levin that he had spent about 15 minutes with the two and then turned them over to his own analysts. Priest interviewed CIA officials who were present at Tenet’s August 2002 briefing at CIA Headquarters. She reports they were “nonplussed” by what they heard. One told her the agency “had discounted already” much of the substance of the Pentagon’s briefing. But there is no indication that Tenet or any of his staff registered objections with Rumsfeld or the Pentagon. Feith then sent the two to the White House where they briefed deputies in the National Security Council and the Office of the Vice President. Priest reports that the briefing contents never made it to the NSC Advisor, the Vice President, or the President.
Priest also reports that congressional investigators “from both parties” have yet to turn up any evidence that this group collected its own intelligence or that this analysis “significantly shaped the case the administration made for going to war.” So what’s going on here? In an on-line chat hosted by the Post, she wrote, “it just doesn’t seem to be the big deal many people are making it into.” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss labeled Levin and Senator Ted Kennedy’s performance at the hearing “bad theater” and likened them to “two old attack dogs gumming their way through artificial outrage about something they should know a lot more about and be more responsible about.”
This one looks good too:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30912FF34550C7A8CDDA80... http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0109-01.htmTHE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: DIPLOMACY; Powell Admits No Hard Proof In Linking Iraq to Al Qaeda
ABSTRACT - Secretary of State Colin L Powell concedes that despite his assertions to United Nations last year, he has no 'smoking gun' proof of link between government of Iraqi Pres Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda; says he thinks possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at that time; his remarks are stark admission that there is no definitive evidence to back administration statements and insinuations that Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda; impression of such a link in public mind has become widely accepted--and something administration officials have done little to discourage
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3540586/Nov. 19 - A leaked Defense Department memo claiming new evidence of an “operational relationship” between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein’s former regime is mostly based on unverified claims that were first advanced by some top Bush administration officials more than a year ago—and were largely discounted at the time by the U.S. intelligence community, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.
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