That memo from Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, to the Senate intelligence committee is still causing a stir in the blogosphere, but is not making much of a splash elsewhere.
Why? Blogger Joshua Marshall has some good answers, which center around this: a) most of the information is old and has been reported before, b) the material in the memo is for the most part raw, unassessed intelligence whose veracity is unclear and c) after all the neoconservative screwups on intelligence hardly anyone, even at the Pentagon, trusts Feith anymore.
“If you’ve been following the intel wars you know that the group that put together this dossier started working in Doug Feith’s office shortly after 9/11 and that they presented these findings -- absent a few details subsequently culled from detainee interviews -- at Langley in August 2002,” Marshall writes. “The methods used by Feith’s Pentagon analysis shop were widely panned and the consensus within the intel community was that the findings didn’t pass the laugh test.
“It is almost certain that the dossier -- or rather the memo summarizing it -- was leaked now because Feith and his ideological soul-mates at the Pentagon are profoundly on the defensive because of the WMD debacle and poor planning for post-war Iraq.
“Indeed, even within his group, Feith’s stock is close to its nadir -- partly because of these sorts of mad-scientist shenanigans, but for other reasons too. The Senate intel investigation, of course, looms. And perhaps Sen. Roberts (R-Kans) won’t be able to force all the blame on the CIA.
“For all these reasons, they are trying to push back anywhere and everywhere they can.”
Meanwhile, Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard, who broke the original story, is back with another piece in response to a Pentagon handout that essentially dismissed the Feith memo as nothing new. He continues to argue that the Feith disclosures demonstrate close ties between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida.
“If the intelligence reporting in the memo was left out of earlier ‘finished intelligence products’ because the reporting is inaccurate, it seems odd that it would form the basis of briefings given to the secretary of Defense, the director of Central Intelligence, and the vice president,” Hayes writes. “And it would be stranger still to include such intelligence in a memo to a Senate panel investigating the potential misuse of intelligence.
“If, on the other hand, the information in the Feith memo is accurate, it changes everything. An operational relationship between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, as detailed in the memo, would represent a threat the United States could not afford to ignore. President Bush and his national security team could not have known everything in the memo, of course, since some of the reporting comes from postwar Iraq. But consider what they did know.”
Read ‘em and decide for yourself.
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