Pentagon cancels release of controversial Iraq report

Well not exactly cancelled but certainly release will be restricted. I wonder how many newspapers other than this one will report on the issue. The contents are hardly news to anyone who has done much reading on the issue but the fact that a Pentagon source confirms that Saddam did not have any links with Al Qaeda is significant. No doubt a significant number of Americans will continue to believe that Hussein and Al Qaeda have close links in spite of the evidence against this opinion.



Pentagon cancels release of controversial Iraq report
By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers
Stephanie Sinclair / Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Wednesday canceled plans for broad public release of a study that found no pre-Iraq war link between late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al Qaida terrorist network.

Rather than posting the report online and making officials available to discuss it, as had been planned, the U.S. Joint Forces Command said it would mail copies of the document to reporters — if they asked for it. The report won't be posted on the Internet.

The reversal highlighted the politically sensitive nature of its conclusions, which were first reported Monday by McClatchy.

In making their case for invading Iraq in 2002 and 2003, President Bush and his top national security aides claimed that Saddam's regime had ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

But the study, based on more than 600,000 captured documents, including audio and video files, found that while Saddam sponsored terrorism, particularly against opponents of his regime and against Israel, there was no evidence of an al Qaida link.

The study comes at a difficult time for the Bush administration. The fifth anniversary of the Iraq war is approaching on March 19, and Bush is attempting to hold support for a continued large U.S. troop presence there following a report from his on-the-ground commander, Army Gen. David Petraeus, in early April.

Navy Capt. Dennis Moynihan, a spokesman for the Norfolk, Va.-based Joint Forces Command, said, "We're making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we'll send it out via CD in the mail."

Moynihan declined further comment.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, referred questions to Joint Forces Command.

An executive summary of the study says that Saddam's regime had interaction with terrorist groups, including Palestinian terror organizations and some pan-Islamic groups.

But "the predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq," says the summary, posted online by ABC News.

That confirms what many experts on Saddam's Iraq have long argued: that his security services were dedicated mainly to fighting threats to his rule.

The summary says that Saddam's secular regime increased cooperation with — and attempts to manipulate — Islamic fundamentalists after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, despite being leery of the Islamists. Iraqi leaders "concluded that in some cases, the benefits of associations outweighed the risks," it says.

(Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this report.)

Feith's Intelligence Propaganda Team

The defence of Feith's operation is indefensible. This group was not out to rigorously analyse the CIAs intelligence. Quite the opposite, they were out to cherry pick intelligence, and ignore intelligence that contradicted their aim which was to prove that Hussein had Al Quaeda links. Cheney still sings the Feith tune.
Even if the link existed its importance would be almost entirely of propaganda value. It is quite possible that on occasion Hussein might find it expedient to link up for purely opportunistic reasons reactionary jihadists. If memory serves this is exactly what the US did to help drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. There are even links between the US and the Taliban. Does no one remember Powell ( I believe) handing a check for five million to the Taliban for their work in stopping poppy production in Afghanistan?


Pentagon probe fills in blanks on Iraq war groundwork
A memo calling for progress on linking Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein marked the beginnings of Feith's project.
By Peter Spiegel
Times Staff Writer

April 6, 2007

WASHINGTON — Just four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz dashed off a memo to a senior Pentagon colleague, demanding action to identify connections between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda.

"We don't seem to be making much progress pulling together intelligence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Wolfowitz wrote in the Jan. 22, 2002, memo to Douglas J. Feith, the department's No. 3 official.

Using Pentagon jargon for the secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, he added: "We owe SecDef some analysis of this subject. Please give me a recommendation on how best to proceed. Appreciate the short turn-around."

Wolfowitz's memo, released Thursday, is included in a recently declassified report by the Pentagon's inspector general. The memo marked the beginnings of what would become a controversial yearlong Pentagon project supervised by Feith to convince the most senior members of the Bush administration that Hussein and Al Qaeda were linked — a conclusion that was hotly disputed by U.S. intelligence agencies at the time and has been discredited in the years since.

In excerpts released in February, Thomas F. Gimble, the acting inspector general of the Pentagon, criticized the project as an alternative intelligence assessment that was improper. However, Gimble said, the operation was not illegal or unauthorized, because Pentagon directives allowed Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to assign the work.

Many of the activities of the intelligence unit Feith headed are now well-known. But the release of the full inspector general's report provides more detail about how a group of Pentagon officials and on-loan intelligence analysts were able to shunt aside contradictory reports and convince top administration officials that they had powerful evidence of connections between Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda. The 121-page report was released by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and is posted on the senator's website, levin.senate.gov/.

Feith has said his project was an appropriate, rigorous effort to question assumptions made by U.S. intelligence agencies. On a website Feith set up in response to the inspector general's report, http://www.dougfeith.com/ , he states: "This IG report controversy is, in essence, a debate over whether the CIA should be protected against criticism by policy officials." (Emphasis is his.)

The current Defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, has disavowed Feith's work, saying in his confirmation hearings and in other public statements that he believes all intelligence analysis should be left to the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which are subject to congressional oversight.

Still, Feith's successor, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric S. Edelman, sent the inspector general a 52-page defense of Feith's project.

In the critique, released with the report, Edelman said that all the activities labeled as "inappropriate" were authorized by Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld, and that the inspector general's discouragement of such outside analysis would have a "dampening effect" on future efforts to challenge intelligence assessments.

"Bipartisan reports and studies by various commissions and congressional committees since the 9/11 attacks have stressed the need for vigorous debate, hard questions and alternative thinking of the sort that motivated the work reviewed in this project," Edelman said.

In making its case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration cited evidence that Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. An important secondary reason was the belief in connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Though the CIA has been criticized for erroneously gauging Iraq's weapons programs, its assessment of Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda proved more accurate.

The report highlights how much credence the Feith group gave to a purported meeting in April 2001 in Prague, Czech Republic, between Mohamed Atta — the lead Sept. 11 hijacker — and Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer. Briefings that Feith's office gave to senior officials, including Rumsfeld and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet, listed such a meeting on a list of "known contacts" between Iraqis and the terrorist organization, according to the report.

The report of a meeting, based on a single source who was in contact with Czech intelligence, was widely questioned by U.S. intelligence agencies at the time and was never substantiated.

The Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA each "published reports that disavowed any 'mature, symbiotic' cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda," the inspector general's report found. "The intelligence community was united in its assessment that the intelligence on the alleged meeting between Mohammed Atta and al-Ani was at least contradictory, but by no means a 'known contact.' "

The report also said Feith tailored his briefings to his audiences: There were at least three versions of the slides he used in different sessions with senior officials.

His Aug. 15, 2002, briefing for Tenet, for instance, omitted a slide titled "Fundamental Problems With How Intelligence Community Is Assessing Information," which was highly critical of the CIA.

The same slide was included, however, when Feith's office briefed I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then the vice president's chief of staff, and Stephen Hadley, then deputy national security advisor.

The report said Feith's criticism of the CIA "undercuts the intelligence community," pointing to Vice President Dick Cheney's validation of the material as "your best source of information" on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.



Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times