New Leak Smells of Neocon Desperation

http://www.antiwar.com/ips/lobe112003.html


New Leak Smells of Neocon Desperation

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 Monday by the influential
neo-conservative journal, The Weekly Standard.

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts characterized 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 Oct. 27 by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

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 prewar 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 programs 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 Standard 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 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?"

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 preexisting 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 Defense 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.

Wilson had just embarrassed the administration by disclosing his trip on
behalf of the CIA to Niger to check out a report that Iraq had bought
uranium "yellowcake." He charged that Bush's assertion about the
yellowcake in his 2003 State of the Union address was false and that the
White House knew it or should have known it at the time.

The evident purpose of the leak to columnist Robert Novak was to
discredit Wilson by suggesting that his mission to Niger was suggested
by his wife.

In fact, the leak provoked enormous anger in the intelligence community
as a major security breach that effectively ended Plame's career as a
covert officer, and potentially endangered her life and those of people
who had worked with her abroad.

The FBI is currently running a criminal investigation on the matter.

"It's obvious that if you cared about the real national security
interests of this country, you wouldn't reveal an asset," said Goodman.
"That shows this is a venal and desperate group who are not considering
the real national-security interests of this country."
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