The Clipboard: Pentagon official distorted intelligence, report says

From an article¹:

As recently as January 2004, a top Defense Department official misrepresented to Congress the view of American intelligence agencies about the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to classified documents described in a new report by a Senate Democrat.

The report said that a classified document prepared by Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, did not accurately reflect the intelligence agencies' assessment of the relationship, despite a Pentagon claim that it did.

In issuing the report, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he would ask the panel to take "appropriate action" against Feith. Levin described the Jan. 15 communication from Feith as part of a pattern in which the Defense Department official, in briefings for Congress and the White House, repeatedly described the ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda as far more significant and extensive than the intelligence agencies had assessed. (link)

Will anybody ever be held accountable? Don't hold your breath waiting.

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Complete text of the article, Pentagon official distorted intelligence, report says, by Douglas Jehl

As recently as January 2004, a top Defense Department official misrepresented to Congress the view of American intelligence agencies about the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to classified documents described in a new report by a Senate Democrat.

The report said that a classified document prepared by Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, did not accurately reflect the intelligence agencies' assessment of the relationship, despite a Pentagon claim that it did.

In issuing the report, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he would ask the panel to take "appropriate action" against Feith. Levin described the Jan. 15 communication from Feith as part of a pattern in which the Defense Department official, in briefings for Congress and the White House, repeatedly described the ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda as far more significant and extensive than the intelligence agencies had assessed.

The broad outlines of the role played by Feith as a champion of the view that Iraq and Al Qaeda were closely linked have been disclosed previously. The view, a staple of the Bush administration's public statements before the Iraq invasion in March 2003, has since been discredited by the Sept. 11 commission, which concluded that Iraq and Al Qaeda had "no close collaborative relationship."

Bush administration officials have defended Feith's prewar efforts as reflecting a legitimate effort to develop an alternative analysis of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. But the report by Levin includes new details showing that Feith's accounts to the White House and Congress through early 2004 deviated from the intelligence agencies' assessments to a degree that the Pentagon official did not acknowledge.

The 46-page report by Levin and the Democratic staff of the Armed Services Committee is the first to focus narrowly on the role played by Feith's office. Democrats had sought to include that line of inquiry in a report completed in June by the Senate Intelligence Committee, but Republicans on that panel succeeded in an effort to postpone that phase of the study until after the presidential election.

In an interview, Levin said that he had concluded that Feith had practiced a "continuing deception of Congress." But he said he had no evidence that Feith's conduct had been illegal in any way.

Levin launched the inquiry in June 2003, after Republicans on the panel, headed by Senator John Warner of Virginia, declined to participate in such an effort. Levin said that his efforts had been endorsed by other Democrats on the panel, but complained that the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency had declined to provide his staff with crucial documents necessary for the inquiry.

The Defense Department and Warner's office did not immediately return telephone calls requesting comment on the report.

Among the findings in the report were that the CIA had concluded by June 2002, earlier than has been previously known, that it was skeptical that a meeting had taken place in April 2001 between the Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official. But Feith and other senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, continued at least through the end of 2002 to describe the alleged meeting as evidence of a possible link between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Levin's report drew particular attention to statements made by Feith in a series of communications with Congress beginning in July 2003 about the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. A classified annex sent by Feith to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Oct. 27, 2003, disclosed two weeks later by the Weekly Standard, asserted in part that "Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003," and concluded that "there can be no longer any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to plot against Americans."

In a Nov. 15 press release, the Defense Department said the "provision of the classified annex to the intelligence committee was cleared by other agencies, and done with the permission of the intelligence community." But Levin's report said that statement was incorrect, because the Central Intelligence Agency had not cleared the release of Feith's annex. It also disclosed for the first time that the CIA, in December 2003, had sent Feith a letter pointing out corrections he should make to the document before providing it to Levin, who had requested the document as part of the investigation.

An unclassified Jan. 15, 2003, letter sent to the Senate Armed Services Committee by Daniel Stanley, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, said that an attached, classified addendum had been prepared by Feith's staff "containing the CIA's proposed changes." But in his report, Levin said that Feith had in fact used the addendum to reiterate assertions challenged by the CIA.

"The CIA's corrections applied to numerous entries in Feith's summary, including some of the reports that claimed the most direct and potentially threatening connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda (i.e. training in bombmaking and meetings between senior Al Qaeda members and intelligence officials)," Levin said in his report. But it says that "while some of the CIA's corrections were made, highly significant corrections relating to Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts were not made."

Among those not made by Feith, the report said, were changes that would have made clear that raw intelligence reports he had described as emanating "from a well-placed source" had in fact been a third-hand account relayed by a foreign intelligence service.

Perhaps most critically, the report says, Feith repeated a questionable assertion related to the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an Al Qaeda ally whose presence in Iraq was cited by the Bush administration before the war as crucial evidence of Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism.

In his Oct. 27 letter, Feith had told Congress that the Iraqi intelligence service knew of Zarqawi's entry to Iraq. In recommending a correction, the CIA said that claim had not been supported by the intelligence report that Feith had cited, the Levin report says. Nevertheless, the Levin report says, Feith reiterated the assertion in his addendum, attributing it to a different intelligence report, but one that also did not state that Iraq knew Zarqawi was in the country.

A reassessment completed by U.S. intelligence agencies in September 2004 has concluded that it is not clear whether or not Saddam's government harbored Zarqawi during his time in Iraq before the war, intelligence officials have said.

reference=http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/10/21/news/intel.html