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C.I.A. Report Says Close Rumsfeld Aid Intentionally Lied about Al Qaeda/Iraq Tie
(Douglas Jehl, New York Times, October 22, 2004)
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 a new report by a Senate Democrat. . . . The report said a classified document prepared by Douglas J. Feith [an Israeli citizen], the under secretary of defense for policy, not only asserted that there were ties between the Baghdad government and the terrorist network, but also did not reflect accurately the intelligence agencies' assessment - even while claiming that it did. . . . Carl M. Levin, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said he would ask the panel to take "appropriate action'' against Mr. Feith. Senator Levin said Mr. Feith had repeatedly described the ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda as far more significant and extensive than the intelligence agencies had. . . . The view, a staple of the Bush administration's public statements before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, has since been discredited by the Sept. 11 commission, which concluded that Iraq and Al Qaeda had "no close collaborative relationship.'' . . . The 46-page report by Senator Levin and the Democratic staff of the Armed Services Committee is the first to focus narrowly on the role played by Mr. 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 the panel postponed that phase of the study until after the presidential election. . . . In an interview, Mr. Levin said he had concluded that Mr. Feith had practiced "continuing deception of Congress.'' . . . A classified annex sent by Mr. Feith to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Oct. 27, 2003, which was disclosed two weeks later by The Weekly Standard, asserted that "Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990's to 2003,'' and concluded, "There can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to plot against Americans.'' . . . The Levin report also disclosed for the first time that the C.I.A., in December 2003, sent Mr. Feith a letter pointing out corrections he should make to the document before providing it to Senator Levin, who had requested the document as part of his investigation. . . . Perhaps most critically, the report says, Mr. Feith repeated a questionable assertion concerning a Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Qaeda ally whose presence in Iraq was cited by the Bush administration before the war as crucial evidence of Mr. Hussein's support for terrorism. . . . In his Oct. 27 letter, Mr. Feith told Congress that the Iraqi intelligence service knew of Mr. Zarqawi's entry into Iraq. In recommending a correction, the C.I.A. said that claim had not been supported by the intelligence report that Mr. Feith had cited, the Levin report says. Nevertheless, the report says, Mr. Feith reiterated the assertion in his addendum, attributing it to a different intelligence report - one that likewise did not state that Iraq knew Mr. Zarqawi was in the country. . . . A reassessment completed by American intelligence agencies in September concluded that it is not clear whether Mr. Hussein's government harbored Mr. Zarqawi during his time in Iraq before the war, intelligence officials have said.

posted by LoZo 1:01 PM