Doug Feith talked to Wolf Blitzer today in the Situation Room. He came to defend his role in the production of intelligence assessments that were meant to push the professional intelligence community to concede that there was an Iraq-al-Qaeda connection before the US invasion of Iraq. It looked to me like at some point Wolf made him sweat, so this is a preview of what will happen to him when he goes testifying before Levin, or Rockefeller on the activities of his OSP.
Lets start with a key portion of the interview, right below the fold...
The setup:
BLITZER: What was the purpose of that report you were putting together on this question of a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?
FEITH: OK. It wasn't a report. It was a criticism of the CIA's work.
BLITZER: Why did you do that?
FEITH: Because the CIA was doing thinks that people in the Pentagon thought were substandard. And the CIA got angry when -- when they got criticized.
Now, as we know, the CIA did not do a flawless job, and we are in trouble in Iraq because of errors that the CIA made. We need more people in the government doing intelligent, professional criticism of intelligence and...
BLITZER: Here's -- here's the criticism, as you well know. The criticism is that you and your colleagues, whether it's the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, the vice president, Dick Cheney, his staff, Scooter Libby, all of you came to the conclusion that there should be a -- an effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and as a result, you just needed the weapons of mass destruction evidence, the al Qaeda connection, and as a result, the Congress and the American public would go along with it.
FEITH: That's -- that's just wrong. I mean, that wasn't the analysis at all.
I know that it's been described that way by critics of the war. It's just inaccurate. I mean...
BLITZER: Looking back...
FEITH: And the record shows -- some day the documents will be -- will be exposed, and that will be exposed as a false narrative.
BLITZER: Do you and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney and Scooter Libby and the president make a mistake?
FEITH: Well, I mean, in the -- lots of mistakes were made and lots of right things were done.
OK, so CIA was bad. Wolf continued:
BLITZER: But in your analysis.
FEITH: The issue here was not that we did an analysis. The issue was we criticized the CIA's analysis.
BLITZER: But right now...
FEITH: Hang on a second.
BLITZER: ... are you ready to acknowledge...
FEITH: No, Wolf. Let me -- no...
BLITZER: ... there were no WMD.
FEITH: Wolf, you're not letting me explain the answers to the problem.
BLITZER: I will. I'll let you explain. But quickly, are you ready to acknowledge there was no WMD, are you ready to acknowledge there was no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda?
FEITH: We did not find WMD stockpiles. We found WMD programs. And the Duelfer Report, as I'm sure you know, was very clear on what we found in the WMD area. Although we did not find the stockpiles, we found that he had the facilities, he had the personnel, he had the intention. So there was a WMD threat, but it wasn't the way the CIA described it.
BLITZER: What about the stockpiles? What about on the al Qaeda connection?
FEITH: On the al Qaeda connection, George Tenet on October 7, 2002, wrote an unclassified letter to the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee laying out the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.
BLITZER: So you believe there was a connection going in to the war?
FEITH: I believed George Tenet.
BLITZER: But now you know that was false?
FEITH: No, it wasn't -- I've never heard that that was false. That's what the...
BLITZER: To this day you believe Saddam was working with al Qaeda?
FEITH: I believe -- I believe that what George Tenet published in October of 2002 was the best information on the subject, and as far as I know, that is largely -- I mean, there may be -- there may be -- look, I've not been in the government for the last year and a half. There may be some more intelligence on that subject.
I'm telling you from the time George Tenet published his findings on the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, which is that they had a relationship for 10 years and they talked about various things, bomb- making and safe haven and other issues, that -- that that was the U.S. government's best understanding of the subject. I never criticized that in public or in private.
OK, so now CIA is good as long as Feith agreed with it. How did that happen?
Lets see what Tenet really said that Feith agreed to, and he seems to agree even today! (Emphasis mine.)
¶Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some of the information we have received comes from detainees, including some of high rank.
¶We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade.
¶Credible information indicates that Iraq and Al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression.
¶Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad.
¶We have credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.
¶Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians coupled with growing indications of relationship with Al Qaeda. suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.
So how many of the Tenet allegations are still standing? Debunking has occurred at many levels, but apparently Feith haven't seen those reports. For example, Spencer Ackerman wrote back in November of 2003:
The final piece of alleged evidence the administration presented before the war came in an October 2002 letter from C.I.A. Director George Tenet to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, stating that "we have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade." But this was at best a disingenuous phrasing, the result of an administration whose senior officials placed significant pressure on its intelligence analysts to reach politically desirable conclusions. The contacts were not, as Tenet's language suggested, ongoing for the past 10 years. Most had occurred during the mid-1990s, in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. At that time, Sudan's Islamism had sent so many spies and terrorists flooding into Khartoum that the city resembled a jihadist version of the bar scene from Star Wars. There, some of the world's most infamous terrorists, such as Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mugniyah, frequently crossed paths with foreign intelligence agents, including, Tenet claimed, Iraq's. But even if Iraqi agents had had contact with al Qaeda operatives, notes one former intelligence official, "that's what all intelligence officers do. They try to get in touch with the bad guys, the enemies, and co-opt them in some way, with money or something else"-which is quite different from forging a working relationship. After all, for decades, C.I.A. agents tried to co-opt Soviet officials. That didn't mean Langley spies grew misty when they heard the strains of "The Internationale," nor did it make Kremlin officials long for "The Star Spangled Banner."
Tenet's letter, which Feith presents as evidence that he (Feith) was right, resulted only after his own outfit at the DOD had shot down the intelligence community's consensus of the "murky" relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida that may have existed in the 1990's. The phase 1 report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on pre-war intelligence has a detailed chronology of the activities of Feith's group conducted to shoot down the consensus of the intelligence community (pages 304 to 312). Feith and his group went directly to Hadley and Libby, before Tenet's October letter, essentially sealing Tenet's fate on this matter.
The committee postponed further evaluation of the Feith products to its phase 2. That's why this story is not going away.