An article called Case Closed by Steve Hayes in American conservative journal, The Weekly Standard has yet to cause much of a stir in Big Media. But it should.
If this story is even partly correct, and frankly given my scepticism about our intelligence agencies, we have to be careful, the findings could be crucial to the war debate. It has been a frequently made point from the anti-war and war sceptic crowd that there was no provable connection between Saddam and radical terror groups linked to 9/11. (They have tended to dismiss this possible link with rather blase haste, as if Saddam was some sort of misunderstood old fellow). Well, that claim of no-link is looking a lot weaker now if Hayes’ article is correct.
I hope this story is properly analysed, the evidence sifted and cross-checked. And please, could bloggers like Jim Henley, who has probably been one of the most articulate anti-war libertarian writers these last few years, and with whom I have enjoyed a friendly email correspondence, do better than just dismiss the Hayes story out of hand?
I didn’t get too excited about this because ignoring it or dismissing it out of hand is exactly what I expect critics of the war to do. You wanna know the headline the Washington Post ran this under? Ha!
CIA Seeks Probe of Iraq-Al Qaeda Memo Leak
How’s that for picking the most important nugget of information out of the story?
DoD Statement on News Reports of al-Qaida and Iraq Connections
News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate.
A letter was sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 27, 2003 from Douglas J. Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in response to follow-up questions from his July 10 testimony. One of the questions posed by the committee asked the Department to provide the reports from the Intelligence Community to which he referred in his testimony before the Committee. These reports dealt with the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida.
The letter to the committee included a classified annex containing a list and description of the requested reports, so that the Committee could obtain the reports from the relevant members of the Intelligence Community.
The items listed in the classified annex were either raw reports or products of the CIA, the NSA, or, in one case, the DIA. The provision of the classified annex to the Intelligence Committee was cleared by other agencies and done with the permission of the Intelligence Community. The selection of the documents was made by DOD to respond to the Committee’s question. The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions.
Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal.
A quick note on Stephen Hayes new article Iraq-al Qaida link story, “Case Closed”, in the Weekly Standard.
(I was watching Fox News Sunday this morning and saw Fred Barnes — Executive Editor of the Standard — go almost apoplectic about how devastating and case-closing a piece it is.)
In any case, the quick note.
First, congratulations to Steve for a great scoop. He and I disagree about most things these days. But I’m certainly an admirer of his work.
But is it “case closed”? Not quite. More like, case restated….
Well, the DOD statement is a classic non-denial that studiously refuses to take a position on the accuracy of the underlying intelligence. Fine. Nonetheless, there seems to be an awful lot of raw intelligence from a huge variety of sources that supports an al Q/Saddam working relationship.
At this point, the a media that gave a crap about what was really going on would start digging like mad and churning out coverage based on the annex. Given the deafening silence, one can only conclude that the elite media in the US doesn’t give a crap about what is really going on.
Is the stuff in the leaked annex really all that new? I thought it had been established months ago that they had a working, if somewhat distant, relationship. I mean, they shared common short- to mid-term goals and common, shall we say, social circles. The really incredible thing, to my mind, would be that they didn’t have a working relationship.
There seems to be an awful lot of bad, raw intelligence from a huge variety of sources.
What you critics of the left don’t understand is that Saddam Hussein was too secular to have been in league with Al Qaeda. He only had a Koran written in his own blood – well, blood anyway – as a sop to Iraq’s Muslim “street”.
What I’ve never understood is why anyone wouldn’t believe that Saddam would pursue a non-military means of attacking the US. Considering the intense drubbing the Iraqi Army got from the first Gulf War, switching to a non-military agenda makes perfect sense.
Frankly if I were a tyrant who just had his army almost completely wiped out I’d be looking for a way to exact revenge. And if that revenge could be exacted without any fingers pointing my way, then that’s the ticket. I’d also do what he did and suborn the “free” press. A few thousand here, a few thousand there, threaten to remove access if anyone prints a negative story and you’re set.
ed
In fairness to fellows like Scott C., the fiasco of the British “sexed-up” WMD dossier has certainly eroded my trust in the usage of such intelligence documents. That said, the stuff that Steve Hayes writes about needs careful analysis. If it turns out to be dud, fine. But let’s at least give it a decent hearing.
Personally, I never really bought the notion that because Saddam started out as a secular ruler, he would at no point bother to get into bed with radical islamists. Saddam’s liasons with such groups may have been cynical and temporary. That would not make them insignificant, and certainly not so post 9/11.
I hope the blogosphere keeps the heat up on this issue.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Iraqis had been playing back room games of quid-pro-quo. Nor would I be suprised to see the same of any major player in the region – even the USA itself. This kind of playing both ends against the middle is the normal sleazy underside of realpolitik.
The usual term of art in the intelligence world for “a lot of self-consistent raw intelligence from a number of unrelated sources” is good intellligence.
The DoD memo goes to some lengths to say that any reports that DoD concluded the case was closed are mistaken, but that the data enumerated in the 50-point memo was real.
This leaves you free to draw your own conclusion; in my opinion, it’s a helluva strong case.
“Self consistent” means cherry-picked; anything not consistent was simply tossed out. Just like the WMD case.
The notion that Saddam the “secular” (i.e. – baathist = secular socialist) leader would never deal with a religious fanatic is absurd. Saddam will use religion whenever it suits him, they never take too seriously the secular part of socialism, or any other ideological point. It’s only power they are after.
The notion of “Osama the religious” is also absurd, Osama was no desert mulla or ayatolla, he was an engineer, educated in the West, who led a very secular life, and religion is only a opportunistic tool of mobilization of the masses to his campaign.
It doesn’t matter if it’s “cherry picked”. If 20 percent of those points are true, then it’s conclusive. More than 20 percent of the points have been confirmed in the open press in the past.
On the other hand, the notion that Saddam and al Qaeda would never co-operate because they are too far apart (secular vs islamic, etc) is a hypothesis which is conclusively disproved if only a few of those points are correct.
So, you choose: favored but disproven hypothesis or intellectual honesty?
Scott seems to have very good access to the very innermost workings of the CIA, DIA, etc.
Of course, in any intelligence gathering operation, lots of info will be gathered that is not consistent. The “intelligence” part of intelligence-gathering consists of evaluating the raw intelligence and creating a coherent best guess at what is really going on. As with any evaluation and editing process, much will be discarded. One assumes that, by Scott’s standards, all intelligence is garbage because it all involves making judgment calls about to rely on and what to disregard.
It’s worth remembering that intelligence analysis is like doing history in real time. The Hayes story and the Feith memo documents a collection of sources, both primary and secondary. (In intelligence, the terms of art are “raw” and “product”.) Like any historian, the analyst must “cherry pick” to identify pieces that make up a coherent narrative.
In this case, the information presented has not been made into a coherent narrative; it’s like an historian’s accumulated index cards. Thus the DoD’s insistence that the Feith memo doesn’t draw any conclusions.
But one is allowed to think for one’s self.
The question is: can one make a coherent narrative of the world that includes even a small part of the information in these sources that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that Saddam and al Qaeda had significant contact, co-operation, and recognized significant common goals?
I don’t tnink so. I’d love to see a believable counter-example that doesn’t include (a) Feith is untrustworthy — because the DoD didn’t deny the information, just the conclusion, and because a lot of the points have been reported independently elsewhere, including by the Cliinton Administration; or (b) that the information can be denied because it came out at a convenient time for the Administration; or (c) doesn’t depend on flat-out misattribution, misquotation, or glaring misreadings.
Charlie seems to think anything that supports the war is true until the honest, trustworthy government denies it. RC Dean seems to think that since judgement calls are always necessary at some level, you get to pick your own reality.
Scott seems to think sarcasm is the same thing as insight.
Weasel said “sarcasm is the same thing as insight”, and therefore believes that. Yea, he said some words before that statement, but you can’t expect me to quote everything he says. Some “cherry picking” in life is totally unavoidable. He did say those words, so that is what he believes, if I get to pick which words to accept and which to ignore.
Lame.
Its not lame, its true until the DoD explicity denies it.
Or it’s false until the DoD explicitly confirms it. Logically, I don’t see a whole lot of difference.
The “evidence” about Saddam and Osama is false until the Dod explicitly proves it. Their failure to deny it loudly enough doesn’t make it true.
Why is “it’s false until they explicitly prove it” more sensible than “it’s true until they explicitly disprove it”? They didn’t deny the data, they denied that they had confirmed the data. That seems a pretty proof-neutral position.
OK, I’ll treat it as false (i.e. it doesn’t change my position) until its proven true. Better?
Huh? Better than what?
I’m confused. Since the DOD is bunch of lying BUSHITLER toadies, would a denial from them tend to support or undermine whatever it is they deny? On the flipside, if they confirm something, does that mean it is definitely a lie, or probably true?
And, if they KNOW we are going to take everything they deny as gospel, and everything they confirm as false, won’t those cunning evil BUSHITLER henchmen just start denying lies and confirming the truth? Or is that denying the truth and confirming lies?
My head hurts.
My point(s) are that:
1. If they don’t confirm or deny it, that doesn’t mean they don’t deny it and are therefore implying that they confirm it.
2. They don’t have a good track record about telling the truth.
Feith Is the Answer
by Jim Lobe
“What’s gonna happen with Feith?”
That, in a nutshell, is the question of the month for the Washington cognoscenti trying to figure out whether a major shift in the Bush administration’s unilateralist and ultra-hawkish foreign policy is or is not underway.
The reference is to Douglas Feith, the administration’s rather obscure but nonetheless strategically placed undersecretary of defense for policy, who reports directly to deputy secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.
If the administration is looking for a scapegoat for the situation it faces in Iraq, Feith is the most likely candidate both because of his relative obscurity compared to other administration hawks and the fact that, of virtually all of them, his ideas – particularly on the Middle East – might be the most radical.
…But, more to the point, virtually everything that has gone wrong in Iraq – especially those matters that Congress is either investigating or is poised to probe – is linked directly to his office. “All roads lead to Feith,” noted one knowledgeable administration official this week.
His now-defunct Office of Special Plans (OSP) is alleged to have collected – often with the help of the neo-conservatives’ favorite Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi – and “cooked” the most alarmist prewar intelligence against Saddam Hussein and then “stovepiped” it to the White House via Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, unvetted by the intelligence agencies.
It was also his office that was in charge of postwar planning, and rejected the product of months of work by dozens of Iraqi exiles and Mideast experts in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who anticipated many of the problems that have wrong-footed the occupation.
The OSP also excluded many top Mideast experts from the State Department from playing any role in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq.
And it is Feith’s office that, with the CPA, recommended companies for huge, and in some cases no-bid, contracts in Iraq that have amounted, in the eyes of some critical lawmakers, to flagrant profiteering. …
You know, Scott, I find your habit of plopping a big wodge of an article in the middle of a thread without further commentary both annoying and uncommunicative. It’s like having someone hold up his end of a conversation by shoving a book in my face. It’s kind of…autistic.
Why not say what it is you find interesting about this article, then link to it? I’m not willing to do your work for you by reading the thing and trying to work it out for myself.
Life’s too short and the Web’s too big.
Well, I’ve read both Hayes stories and got pretty convinced (and was not much impressed by the DOD “denial”), and then I read this Newsweek article, found at: http://www.msnbc.com/news/995706.asp?0cv=KB10, and was thrown back into the Cheney position (“don’t know for sure”). (See also: http://slate.msn.com/id/2091381/) Any guidance from those who know more about this sort of stuff?
Weasel, how about this one:
New Leak Smells of Neocon Desperation
by Jim Lobe
November 20, 2003
This week’s blockbuster leak of a secret memorandum from a senior Pentagon official to the Senate Intelligence Committee has spurred speculation that neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration are on the defensive and growing more desperate….
…W. Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Washington Post the article amounted to a “listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship.”
At the same time, he added, it raises the question: “If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?”…
…“This is made to dazzle the eyes of the not terribly educated,” Greg Thielmann, a veteran of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) who retired in 2002, told IPS…. …
Case Decidedly Not Closed
The Defense Dept. memo allegedly proving a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam does nothing of the sort
Nov. 19 – A leaked Defense Department memo claiming new evidence of an “operational relationship” between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein’s former regime is mostly based on unverified claims that were first advanced by some top Bush administration officials more than a year ago – and were largely discounted at the time by the U.S. intelligence community, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials….