Text 3467, 81 rader
Skriven 2007-02-15 14:22:00 av ROSS SAUER
Ärende: Feith
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Feith cherry-picks rumors for Bush and Cheney, and now claims he was 
right.
How this guy can sleep at night is a mystery, knowing he has 3,000 US 
troops' blood on his hands.

Feith: I Was Right All Along

By Spencer Ackerman - February 14, 2007, 9:47 AM 

In a Washington Post op-ed today, former Undersecretary of Defense 
Douglas Feith defends himself against the Pentagon inspector general's 
assessment that his office conducted "inappropriate" intelligence work 
in the lead-up to the Iraq war. It turns out, in Feith's view, that he's 
been vindicated after all.

As Feith tells it, his analysts were conducting no more than an academic 
critique of intelligence work, and to find fault with their effort is to 
accept the absurdity that policymakers must uncritically endorse the 
CIA's product. He goes so far to say that since now, after the invasion 
of Iraq, al-Qaeda and former Baathists have colluded in attacks on U.S. 
forces, the CIA was wrong and he was right -- even though what the CIA 
actually said was that there was no evidence of collusion before the 
war, and that the only thing that might bring on such cooperation was 
... a U.S. attack. 

Then there's Feith's description of what the 2004 Senate intelligence 
committee report said:

A 2004 Senate intelligence committee report praised the quality of the 
Pentagon's Iraq-al-Qaeda work -- the critical briefing and the related 
Pentagon-CIA dialogue. The policy officials "played by [intelligence 
community] rules" and asked questions that "actually improved the 
Central Intelligence Agency's products," it said.

Unfortunately for Feith, the report also concluded that the CIA's 
intelligence product on the "murky relationship" between Iraq and al-
Qaeda that Feith found so unacceptable was ultimately correct. Starting 
on page 345 of the report are these conclusions:

Conclusion 90: The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment that Saddam 
Hussein was most likely to use his own intelligence service operatives 
to conduct attacks was reasonable, and turned out to be accurate. ... 
Conclusion 92: The Central Intelligence Agency's examination of 
contacts, training, safehaven and operation cooperation as indicators of 
a possible Iraq-al-Qaida relationship was a reasonable and objective 
approach to the question. ...

Conclusion 93: The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that 
there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and al-
Qaida throughout the 1990s, but that these contacts did not add up to an 
established formal relationship. ...

Conclusion 94. The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably and 
objectively assessed in Iraqi Support for Terrorism that the most 
problematic area of contact between Iraq and al-Qaida were the reports 
of training in the use of non-conventional weapons, specifically 
chemical and biological weapons.

Just as a footnote here: those claims were later recanted by their 
source, an al-Qaeda detainee, Ibn Shaikh al-Libi, who was likely 
tortured into making them. But anyway.

Conclusion 95: The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment on safehaven 
-- that al-Qaida or associated operatives were present in Baghdad and in 
northeastern Iraq in an area under Kurdish control -- was reasonable. 
Conclusion 96: The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment that to date 
there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an al-
Qaida attack was reasonable and objective. No additional information has 
emerged to suggest otherwise.

Conclusion 97: The Central Intelligence Agency's judgment that Saddam 
Hussein, if sufficiently desperate, might employ terrorists with a 
global reach -- al-Qaida -- to conduct terrorist attacks in the event of 
war, was reasonable. No information has emerged thus far to suggest that 
Saddam did try to employ al-Qaida in conducting terrorist attacks.

Copyright © 2007 TPM Media 

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