[iwar] The Case of the Misunderstood Memo

The Case of the Misunderstood Memo
The Feith "annex" highlights the Bush administration's misuse of
intelligence material.
By Daniel Benjamin
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2003, at 11:14 AM PT

When they published their "Case Closed" cover story three weeks ago on the
relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaida, the editors of the
Weekly Standard aimed to set off a bomb. The article was centered on a
sizable leakb9a gusher, reallyb9of classified intelligence, 50 raw reports
that had been strung together in the Pentagon to demonstrate the
"operational relationship" between Osama Bin Laden's organization and Iraq.
The target was the consensus among journalists and experts that there were
no substantive ties between Baghdad and al-Qaida. If the article achieved
its goal, it would help shore up the rickety argument that Baathist Iraq had
posed a real national security threat to the United States.

Despite Jack Shafer's cri de coeur for some real reporting on the matter,
the bomb sputtered. Some big publications took a passing look at material
from the leaked annex to a letter from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas
Feith to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligenceb9the document in which
the 50 reports are summarizedb9but mostly for the sake of knocking it down,
either explicitly or backhandedly. The piece has elicited one genuinely
interesting column from the Washington Post's David Ignatius, who revealed
that the United States and Britain had a highly placed informant in Iraqi
intelligence "who told them before the war that in the late 1990s, Saddam
Hussein had indeed considered such an operational relationship with bin
Ladenb9and then decided against it."

For the most part, though, it seems the few beat reporters who cover the
intelligence community called their sources and were told there was nothing
new hereb9that the article was not, as author Stephen L. Hayes claimed, the
fatal reproof to "critics of the Bush Administration [who] have complained
that Iraq-al Qaeda connections are a fantasy, trumped up by the warmongers
at the White House to fit their preconceived notions about international
terror."

As subsequent editorials show, this has clearly infuriated the Weekly
Standard crowd, who were also hoping to flush administration foxes from the
hedges and force them finally to back up the allegations they have made
about Saddam and Bin Laden. As someone who co-wrote a book, The Age of
Sacred Terror, that argued there was no substantive relationship between
al-Qaida and Iraqb9a conclusion based on a review of relevant intelligence
from when I worked on counterterrorism at the National Security Council in
the late 1990sb9as well as a series of op-eds in the New York Times and
elsewhere saying the same thing, I guess I should be happy that the Hayes
piece stirred the pot so little.

Instead, I'm as frustrated as the Standard-bearers.

Why? First, the Feith memo does not prove what it sets out to, and a fuller
airing of the issues would bring clarity to a topic that desperately needs
it. Second, and more important, the document lends substance to the
frequently voiced criticism that some in the Bush administration have
misused intelligence to advance their policy goals.

Hayes contends that Feith's document demonstrates that the relationship
between al-Qaida and Iraq "involved training in explosives and weapons of
mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda
training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al
Qaedab9perhaps even for Mohamed Atta." Yet in any serious intelligence
review, much of the material presented would quickly be discarded. For
example, one report claims Bin Laden visited Baghdad to meet with Iraqi
Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz in 1998, but this is extremely unlikely to
be true given how many intelligence services were tracking both individuals'
movements. Countless intelligence and press accounts of Bin Laden's travels
have appeared over the years while the man himself remained only where he
was safe: Afghanistan. Hence, another report that has him traveling to Qatar
in 1996 is almost as unlikely.

There are also glaring mistakes in the analytic material, though whether the
errors were originally Feith's or Hayes' is not clear. What is referred to
as Bin Laden's "fatwa on the plight of Iraq" was in fact the famous "Jihad
Against Jews and Crusaders," which spoke of the suffering of Iraqis but only
as proof of a U.S.-led global campaign to destroy Islam. If anything, the
sense of grievance over events, including the U.S. troop presence, on the
Arabian peninsula is far greater. Moreover, some of the material presented
in the article insinuates that Iraq staged the Khobar Towers bombing, when
two administrations have laid the blame at Iran's door.

The Feith document does not recount many details of an operational
relationship, nor does it illustrate a tie that was ongoing, cooperative,
and operational. At best, it records expressions of various individuals'
wish for a better relationship between the two sidesb9a desire that does not
appear to have been consummated. Meetings between Iraqi officials and
al-Qaida members began in the early 1990s, and there are reports that Iraq
wanted to "establish links to al Qaeda." In 1993, "bin Laden wanted to
expand his organization's capabilities through ties with Iraq." But in 1998,
the Iraqis still "seek closer ties," and the sides are still "looking for a
way to maintain contacts."

There was a lot of seeking and wanting going on, and perhaps there were even
meetings. But the fact that meetings occurred has never been the issueb9at
least not among serious criticsb9nor has it been disputed that some jihadists
lived in or traveled through Iraq. (There were more meetings with Iranian
authorities, as well as more terrorists living in or transiting Iran, but
that seems to interest neither Feith nor Hayes.) What is disputed is that
the meetings went anywhere. It would not be surprising to find out that the
two sides had a de facto cease-fire, as has been alleged. But we're still
waiting to see real cooperation in the form of transfers of weapons and
other materiel, know-how, or funds; the provision of safe haven on a
significant scale; or the use of Iraqi diplomatic facilities by al-Qaida
terrorists. The Feith memo mentions a few instances of possible Iraqi
assistance to al-Qaida on bomb-building and weapons supply to affiliated
groups, but nothing like the kind of evidence that, in Hayes' words, "is
detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources."

What does all this say about how Feith and his underlings use intelligence?
Hayes says, correctly, that the Feith memo "just skims the surface of the
reporting on Iraq-al Qaeda connections." The large sampling provided in his
article, he believes, destroys critics' arguments "that links between Saddam
Hussein and Osama bin Laden have been routinely 'exaggerated' for political
purposes; that hawks 'cherry-picked' bits of intelligence and tendentiously
presented these to the American public."

What Hayes does not seem to recognize is that many of the treasures he
imagines hidden in the existing CIA files may be dross or worse and, if
presented, they would undermine the " 'Cliff's notes' version of the
relationship" that he says is provided by the Feith memo. Of course there
are more reports. When your intelligence service relays, as it should,
everything short of sightings of Bin Laden on the moon, 50 reports of
varying quality do not amount to much. The remaining material, many who are
familiar with it believe, does not confirm the Hayes-Feith version but
points in the other direction.

Not surprisingly, none of the reports in the Feith memo mention the aversion
that the Baathist and jihadists felt for one another. Similarly, there is no
evidence of the contradictory nature of the intelligence. I would bet, for
example, that there are plenty of reports putting Bin Laden in Afghanistan
and perhaps a half a dozen other places in January 1998, at exactly the time
he was supposed to be in Baghdadb9and that would be only the most blatant
kind of inconsistency. Attributing a report to a "contact with good access"
does not mean the contact's account is true. Proving a report correct, or
sufficiently corroborated to be considered plausible, requires a lot more
work. Putting all the disparate pieces together and trying to construct a
coherent pictureb9yes, connecting the dotsb9is harder still, requiring a
mastery of all the material. Of course, raw intelligence has its value,
especially if you are worried about an imminent attack, but there is a
reason why the intelligence community spends so much time and energy putting
out "finished product," the reports that evaluate a significant body of
information to get the whole picture right. Those are the reports that
policy-makers are supposed to rely on in crafting a strategy.

One thing intelligence analysts do as they evaluate a body of information is
keep in mind the context. This is worth attempting in the case of the Feith
memo, too, because while much of the material may be new to the public, most
of it has been bouncing around the government since well before the invasion
of Iraq. That means it has been scrubbed numerous times by analysts and
senior officials eager to use it as they made the case for invading Iraq.

After these reviews, it is clear, very little has been found that was solid
enough to present in public. Compare the Feith memo with Colin Powell's U.N.
speech, which was preceded by the most thorough evaluation of the
intelligence ever conducted by the Bush administration. Remarkably little on
the ties between al-Qaida and Iraq made it into that speech. Or compare the
memo with the recent remarks of Vice President Dick Cheney, who has all but
stopped listing possible al-Qaida-Iraq connections and has given up
suggesting that Mohammed Atta met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence
official since saying it on Meet the Press in September. (After that
appearance, the Washington Post noted that he was arguing a point the FBI
and CIA didn't believe was true.) If top officials had any confidence in
these wares, they would still be out hawking them. Why the Feith memo is
being sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee is also therefore baffling.

It should be clear now why the Feith document needs a lot more attention:
The memo is, Hayes' declarations to the contrary, cherry-pickingb9the
selective use of intelligence. It lends credence to Seymour Hersh's
reporting in The New Yorker about political appointees ignoring career
analysts and dredging out whatever suits them. This is perilous business.
Making a judgment about Iraq-al-Qaida ties on the basis of the sections
presented by Hayes would be like accepting a high-school biology student's
reading of a CAT scan.

The administration's use of intelligence regarding weapons of mass
destruction became a hot issue primarily because of the failure to find any
such weapons in Iraq and Joe Wilson's revelations about the non-export of
uranium from Niger to Iraq. Strangely, however, there has been little
inquiry into the Iraq-al-Qaida relationship. The press has had a difficult
time taking this issue any further since so few reporters have good sources
in the intelligence community. In Congress, an effort to push further into
the issue in the Senate Intelligence Committee has been stymied by the
Republican majority's refusal to discuss how the political leadership used
the intelligence it was provided with. That is a recipe for putting the
blame for any Iraq-related blunders on the intelligence community, not those
in the Pentagon or White House who may have misread or ignored the
intelligence they were given.

Americans were told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was
significantly more dangerous than any of the other two dozen or so countries
that currently possess them because Saddam might on any given day give such
weapons to terrorists. The danger was urgent, we were told, because the
Baghdad regime had a relationship with al-Qaida. Given the costs the nation
has incurred in Iraq, a conscientious review of the issue would seem to be a
good investment in democratic accountability. Since neoconservatives are
certain they are right about the Saddam-Bin Laden relationship, maybe
they'll join Senate Democrats in demanding a fuller airing.

Daniel Benjamin, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, was director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council
staff. He is the co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror.

-- This communication is confidential to the parties it is intended to serve --
Fred Cohen - http://all.net/ - fc@all.net - fc@unhca.com - tel/fax: 925-454-0171
Fred Cohen & Associates - University of New Haven - Security Posture

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Received on Wed Dec 10 10:47:42 2003