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The truth leaks out
By
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
This week's blockbuster leak of a secret memorandum from
a senior Pentagon official to the US 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 Weekly Standard article,
"Case Closed", is a summary of a lengthy memo sent to
the committee October 27 by Undersecretary of Defence
for Policy Douglas Feith. He had been asked by the
senators to provide support for his assertion in a
closed hearing in 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 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 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 Inter Press
Service. ''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 in Washington.
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
declared its ''war on terror'' in September 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 in 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 the Washington Post 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 into 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.''
(Inter Press Service)
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