It was good to hear former Pentagon official Douglas Feith give a spirited defense of his office's pre-war intelligence analysis work today, in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.
WALLACE: Mr. Feith, the Pentagon inspector general says some of your intelligence was not supported by the evidence that came from the intelligence community. The 9/11 commission said a number of your conclusions were wrong. And the Senate Intelligence Committee also said it was wrong.FEITH: Nobody ever claimed that what the 9/11 commission said was — the case was wrong. In other words, we didn't dispute the — the 9/11 commission report said there was no...
WALLACE: But they disputed you, sir.
FEITH: No, they didn't. Nobody in my office ever said there was an operational relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. It's just not correct. I mean, words matter. And people are throwing around loose allegations, vague allegations, based on not reading the words carefully.
WALLACE: Mr. Feith, I'm just taking comments from your PowerPoint. You said some indications of possible Iraqi coordination with Al Qaeda specifically related to 9/11. You said that the Atta-Ani meeting in Prague in 2001 was a known contact.
FEITH: The people who did that briefing were taking the position that the intelligence community took originally. The CIA later changed its views on that meeting after the time relevant here.
There's an enormous amount of misinformation about this subject. Your quote from the 9/11 commission report is significant. That did not contradict my office. Nobody in my office ever claimed there was an operational relationship.
There was a relationship. That relationship was summarized on October 7th, 2002, by George Tenet in a letter that he sent, unclassified, to the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, and it basically brought together what the CIA had been saying, what my people had been criticizing, and it summarized the Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship.
And we stood on that, and I think that that was the best information that the government had.
Andrew McCarthy says the Pentagon IG report shows we’re not serious about reform.
The [Inspector General] report is part big “so what” and part perfect illustration that Congress loves to talk about intelligence reform but cares little about reformed intelligence.Posted by Alan at February 11, 2007 05:40 PMAs for “so what”: The IG’s report concludes that a Pentagon unit which scrubbed existing intelligence about Iraq’s terror ties under the leadership of Doug Feith, then-Undersecretary for Policy, did not mislead Congress. It further finds that neither Feith nor any other Defense officials engaged in wrong-doing. Nevertheless, acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble huffs and puffs and contends that Feith’s unit still behaved “inappropriately.”
Why? Because it dared to question that which we now know for a fact was wrong: the Intelligence Community’s assessments about Iraq, and, in particular, the conventional wisdom that secular Saddam and his Baathists would never collude with Islamic fundamentalists....
[W]hat was so “inappropriate”? The people who actually had to fight the war had the audacity to conduct their own independent assessment of what we now know beyond cavil was the Intelligence Community’s appallingly sparse and shoddy work. Feith and his unit engaged in critical thinking (can’t have that!), and allegedly failed to register their disagreements in a fashion consistent with Intelligence Community protocols (i.e., the governing standards under which, in just the last two decades, the IC has missed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of India as a nuclear power, etc.).