Pentagon touted link between Saddam and al-Qaida

By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Douglas Feith, undersecretary of Defense

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

Related stories Blair to shift 850 soldiers to Baghdad Insurgents infiltrate new forces, report says

The connection was cited by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials in making the case for last year's invasion of Iraq.

Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, cited the Pentagon's use of the suspect material in a report based on a 16-month inquiry by Democratic staff aides on pre-war intelligence.

"In the case of Iraq's relationship with al-Qaida, intelligence was exaggerated to support administration policy," the report said.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, took strong issue with the report and said Levin was trying to influence the presidential election. Warner said that much of the material on which Levin's report relied remained classified, and therefore difficult to rebut.

Levin denied trying to influence the election, which is 11 days away.

The report focused on a still-classified August 2002 analysis of alleged links between Iraq and al-Qaida produced by the office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, a key architect of the administration's Iraq policy.

Leven's report said Feith's aides incorporated into the analysis "raw reports involving Iraq and al-Qaida that the IC (intelligence community) had previously considered but deemed not suitable to reflect in finished intelligence reports."

Feith's aides gave their analysis to the White House but withheld from the CIA those parts the agency disagreed with, the Levin report said. The implication is that if the CIA had known the information was going to the White House, it would have objected.

The White House briefing included a discussion of an alleged meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, between an Iraqi intelligence official and Mohammad Atta, the leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, five months before the suicide attacks.

But the discussion was excluded from a briefing to the CIA, whose analysts were unable to confirm that such a meeting had occurred and had expressed skepticism about the allegation months before the Pentagon analysis was published, the Levin report said.
 
The CIA declined to comment yesterday.

The bipartisan 9-11 commission found in July that the meeting never took place, and that despite contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq, there was no evidence of a "collaborative relationship."

The exclusion of the alleged Prague meeting from the CIA briefing was just one of 35 differences between that version of the Pentagon analysis and the version presented to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the White House, said the Levin report.

The Pentagon has maintained that Feith's operation was not an intelligence outfit, but a policy shop, and that its work was appropriate.

In a statement yesterday, the Pentagon said bipartisan reports have noted relationships between al-Qaida and Iraq before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The statement also said a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation this summer found "no evidence that administration officials tried to coerce, influence or pressure intelligence analysts to change their judgments about Iraq's WMD capabilities or links to terrorism."

Democrats, however, have challenged that finding of the Republican-led panel.

In his report, Levin said the CIA also requested a number of corrections to a memo written by Feith and provided to some senators in 2003, before the memo could be distributed widely to the Senate armed services panel.

But, Levin's report says, crucial changes requested by the CIA were not made, including alterations to information about the credibility of a source who provided raw intelligence on the Iraq-al-Qaida link. Levin suggests the changes would have weakened evidence of a link.

The report also cites instances when the Pentagon analysts failed to fully comply with CIA requests that exaggerated claims be deleted or corrected. In one case, the CIA warned Feith's office against using a claim that Saddam's regime knew suspected terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had entered Iraq, saying the assertion was "unsupported."

Rather than remove the long-disputed claim, the Pentagon intelligence unit left it unchanged and "cited a different CIA report in support of (the) assertion," Levin's report said.

Material from The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times is included in this report.