New Leakergate put pressure on PNAC-Neocon Hawks

posted by ewing2001 on Saturday November 22, @06:59AM

Feith and Libby main suspects of "deplorable" and "illegal" leak

Leaks in Pentagon indicate neo-cons' desperation

HiPakistan -November 22 2003

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON: 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.

Both the committee and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have asked the Justice Department to launch an investigation of the leak, which took the form of an article published on Monday by the influential neo-conservative journal, 'The Weekly Standard'.

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts characterised the leak as 'egregious', noting that it might have compromised "highly classified information" on intelligence sources and methods of collecting information, as well as ongoing investigations. He also said he did not believe the leak came from his committee or its staff.

The Pentagon issued an unusual press statement declaring that the leak was "deplorable and may be illegal". The article, 'Case Closed', is a summary of a lengthy memo sent to the committee on Oct 27 by Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith.

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He had been asked by the senators to provide support for his assertion in a closed hearing last July that US intelligence agencies had established a long-standing operational link between the Al Qaeda terrorist group and Baghdad.

That, and similar assertions by senior Bush officials before the war, have long been considered questionable, more so after the war when the administration - as with its pre-war contentions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - failed to come up with evidence to back its case.

Investigative reporters and Iraq war critics have accused Feith's office of having manipulated or 'cherry-picked' the intelligence on Iraq's purported ties to Al Qaeda and WMD programmes before the war to persuade Bush and the public that Saddam posed a serious threat to the United States.

The leaked memo consists mainly of 50 excerpts culled from raw intelligence reports by four US intelligence agencies about alleged Al Qaeda-Iraqi contacts from 1990 to 2003.

Some of the reports include brief analysis, but most cite accounts by unnamed sources, such as "a contact with good access", "a well placed source", "a former senior Iraqi intelligence officer", a "regular and reliable source", "sensitive CIA reporting", and "a foreign government service".

Although the article's author, Weekly correspondent Stephen Hayes, concludes that much of the evidence is "detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources", the only example of real corroboration is with respect to several reports regarding contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraqi agents in Afghanistan in 1999.

Most of the excerpts deal instead with alleged meetings or less direct contacts in which sources claim that Al Qaeda agents are requesting certain kinds of assistance, such as a safe haven, training or, in one case, WMD.

While supporters of the war in Iraq, such as the New York Times' William Safire, have jumped on the Hayes' article as proof of what the administration had alleged, retired intelligence officers have criticized it, both because of the security breach of the leak itself and because its contents are anything but "conclusive" of an operational relationship.

W. Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of the Defence 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?" Other retired officers stressed that, to the extent that virtually all of the excerpts consist of raw intelligence unvetted by professional analysts, the article appeared to prove precisely what critics had been saying: Feith's office simply picked those items in raw intelligence that tended to confirm their pre-existing views that a relationship must have existed, without subjecting the evidence to the kind of rigorous analysis that intelligence agencies would apply.

"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.

"It begs the question, 'Is this the best they can do'? If you're going to expose this stuff, you'd better have something more than this," he said, adding, "My inclination is to interpret this as probably a very good example of cherry-picking and the selective use of intelligence that was so obvious in the lead-up to the war."

Melvin Goodman, a former top CIA analyst, said the leak is a sign of desperation. "To me, they had to leak something like this, because the neo-conservatives (in the administration) have nothing to stand on. They're trying to get the idea out there that, 'Hey, there was a case for war', and they have 'useful idiots' like Safire who say they're right."

The notion that the leak was "friendly" or "authorized" by hawks in the Pentagon or their allies in Vice President Dick Cheney's office - as opposed to an unauthorized leak designed to embarrass the author - is widely accepted here.

The Standard, particularly Hayes and executive editor William Kristol, have acted as a mouthpiece for administration hawks like Feith, his immediate boss, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and their friends in Cheney's office, particularly his powerful chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, since even before the administration's "war on terror", declared after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon on Sept 11, 2001.

But at the same time it raises serious questions about the judgment of those responsible for the leak. Not only does the intelligence contained in the article fall embarrassingly short of "closing the case" on Iraq-Al Qaeda links, the leak itself of such highly classified material might fuel the impression that the neo-conservatives, if they were indeed the source, are willing to sacrifice the country's secrets to retain power.

"It shows a cavalier and almost contemptuous regard for the national security rationale for keeping information classified," according to Thielmann. "The objective of silencing the critics is so overwhelming that you have to throw national security secrets to the wind."

Both he and Goodman noted striking similarities between this latest case and the leak last July of the identity of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA officer.

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