Great article by David Corn:
But allow me to point out that several years too late the Inspector General of the Pentagon has finished an investigation of the Defense Department intelligence cell that was created before the Iraq war by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, a neocon hawk. Feith's outfit dug up and manipulated raw intelligence tidbits to support the charge that Saddam Hussein was in league with al Qaeda. This was a key part of the White House sales campaign for the war (as Michael Isikoff and I note in our book).
For years, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who now chairs the armed services committee, pushed for a full investigation of the Feith operation. The Republicans in charge in the Senate resisted, and kicked the inquiry to the IG.
The IG's report is classified. But the declassified summary states that Feith's outfit engaged in "inappropriate" (though not unlawful) activity, that it had been wrong to claim that al Qaeda and Saddam had "a mature symbiotic relationship." and that it produced material that was not "the most accurate analysis of intelligence." Now they tell us. You can read the summary here.
Let's give Levin the last word. In a statement on the IG report, he noted:
The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the Administration's decision to invade Iraq when the intelligence assessments of the professional analysts of the Intelligence Community did not provide the desired compelling case. The Inspector General's report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war.
http://www.davidcorn.com/
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