The Daily Background

Recent days have seen a flurry of intelligence disclosures that reinforce suspicions that the pre-war Iraq information the Bush Administration claims it thought was solid at the time- may not have been so.

In Senate testimony Friday, it was revealed that the CIA’s own intelligence analysts “disagreed with more than 50%” of the Pentagon’s pre-war claims about Iraq. Much of these claims originated in the so-called Office of Special Plans, an ultra-secretive unit run by former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith.

Feith, a neocon who Donald Rumsfeld once praised, saying “Doug Feith, of course, is without question, one of the most brilliant individuals in government,” has been called by Dick Cheney the “best source” for information regarding Iraq’s alleged connections with al Qaeda. Connections that, it is widely recognized now, never existed.

In an article discussing pre-war intelligence yesterday, the LA Times noted accurately that “Most of the evidence that Feith’s Office of Special Plans cited in making its case for significant collaboration between Baghdad and Al Qaeda has crumbled under postwar scrutiny.”

A recent Pentagon report concluded that Feith’s office did not do anything illegal, but said its conduct was inappropriate, and that it “documented the unusual efforts by Defense Department policymakers to bypass regular intelligence channels and influence officials at the highest level of government.”

Senate Armed Services Commitee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) called the new findings “very damning” and “devastating.” Levin also told reporters that “the bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration’s decision to invade Iraq.”

Feith dismissed Levin’s criticism and all other criticism of his flawed Pentagon work as simply “smears.”

Feith’s office (which once authored a memo titled “Iraq and al-Qaida: Making the Case”) was obsessed with finding nonexistent links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. McClatchy Newspapers recently summarized Feith’s efforts saying that “the unit cited as its strongest evidence a purported April 2001 meeting in the Czech capital of Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence officer and Mohamed Atta, who led the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon several months later.”

“At the time, the CIA had doubts about reports of the meeting, and the agency and the FBI subsequently concluded that it never took place.”

Filed under: Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog