Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence

The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.

A Weekly Standard article, titled "Case Closed," published Monday summarized a lengthy memorandum sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Oct. 27 by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith. He was responding to a request to provide evidence supporting his assertion during a closed hearing last July that U.S. intelligence agencies had established a long-standing operational links between al Qaeda and Baghdad.

The memorandum consists mainly of 50 excerpts culled from raw intelligence reports by four U.S. intelligence agencies about alleged al Qaeda-Iraqi contacts from 1990 to 2003. Some of the reports include brief analysis, but most cite accounts by unnamed sources, such as "a contact with good access," "a well placed source," "a former senior Iraqi intelligence officer," a "regular and reliable source," "sensitive CIA reporting," and "a foreign government service." A few refer to statements made by captured al Qaeda members or Iraqi officials in U.S. custody.

Most onlookers agree that the leak was "friendly" or "authorized" by either hawks in the Pentagon or their allies in Vice President Dick Cheney's office. It was clearly intended to rebuff investigative reporters and Iraq war critics who have accused Feith's office of having manipulated or "cherry-picked" the intelligence to build a case for war.

The Standard, particularly Hayes and executive editor William Kristol, have acted as a mouthpiece for administration hawks like Feith, his immediate boss, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and their friends in Cheney's office, particularly his powerful chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, since even before the "war on terror."

While supporters of the war in Iraq, such as the New York Times' William Safire, have jumped on the Hayes' article as proof of what the administration had been saying, retired intelligence officers have criticized it, both because of the security breach created by the leak itself and because its so-called "evidence" is hardly convincing.

Although the article's author, Weekly correspondent Stephen Hayes, concludes that much of the evidence presented in the article is "detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources," the only example of real corroboration is with respect to several reports referring to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraqi agents in Afghanistan in 1999. Most of the excerpts deal instead with alleged meetings or less direct contacts in which sources claim that al Qaeda agents were requesting certain kinds of assistance, such as safe haven, training, or, in one case, WMD.

W. Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Washington Post that the article amounted to a "listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship." However, at the same time it raises the question: "If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying"?

Moreover, Feith's office seems to have once again simply picked those pieces of raw intelligence that confirmed their pre-existing views instead of subjecting the evidence to the rigorous analysis required by intelligence agencies. "This is made to dazzle the eyes of the not terribly educated," says Greg Thielmann, a veteran of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) who retired in the Fall of 2002. "It begs the question, 'Is this the best they can do?' If you're going to expose this stuff, you'd better have something more than this," he said, adding, "My inclination is to interpret this as probably a very good example of cherry-picking and the selective use of intelligence that was so obvious in the lead-up to the war."