Chris Wallace smashes Feith's pre-war Qaeda 'lies'

danarhea said:

Can't believe that Douglas Feith had the cahonas to actually state in an interview that he never charged that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda. Neither did Chris Wallace, who proceeded to completely rip him apart on this notable "noble lie", which was used by the Bush administration as part of their justification to go war with Iraq. The Bush administration lied, and soldiers died. That is not supporting the troops.

Article is here.

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Douglas Feith: Nobody in my office ever said there was an operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. It's just not correct. I mean, words matter.

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Wallace: But it turns out he did make that case in a memo he sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee in October of '03. The Weekly Standard, who saw the Feith memo, described it this way: 'Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003

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RightatNYU said:

2 things:

1) Where's his rebuttal? You'd think that if you wanted to really decimate someone, you'd have them on the show, or at least ask them for comment. Nowhere was he given a chance to explain this.

2) Look at the exchange:



So, we don't actually know what the memo said.

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Case Closed
From the November 24, 2003 issue: The U.S. government's secret memo detailing cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
by Stephen F. Hayes
11/24/2003, Volume 009, Issue 11


The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies.

Case Closed

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DoD Statement on News Reports of Al Qaeda and Iraq Connections​

News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate.

A letter was sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Oct. 27, 2003, from Douglas J. Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, in response to follow-up questions from his July 10 testimony. One of the questions posed by the committee asked the department to provide the reports from the intelligence community to which he referred in his testimony before the committee. These reports dealt with the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

The letter to the committee included a classified annex containing a list and description of the requested reports, so that the committee could obtain the reports from the relevant members of the intelligence community.

The items listed in the classified annex were either raw reports or products of the CIA, the National Security Agency or, in one case, the Defense Intelligence Agency. The provision of the classified annex to the Intelligence Committee was cleared by other agencies and done with the permission of the intelligence community. The selection of the documents was made by DoD to respond to the committee’s question. The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions.

Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal.



DefenseLink News Release: DoD Statement on News Reports of Al Qaeda and Iraq Connections

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The Saddam-Osama Memo (cont.)
A close examination of the Defense Department's latest statement.
by Stephen F. Hayes
11/19/2003 12:00:00 AM

THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT late Saturday, November 15, issued a statement that began: "News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate."

The statement didn't specify the "inaccurate" news reports, but most observers have inferred that the main report in question was an article in the most recent issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD--Case Closed: The U.S. government's secret memo detailing cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. "Case Closed" described an October 27 memorandum to the Senate Intelligence Committee from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, which included 50 numbered items of intelligence from a variety of sources and agencies on links between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.
The Pentagon's statement continues:

The items listed in the classified annex were either raw reports or products of the CIA, the NSA, or, in one case, the DIA. The provision of the classified annex to the Intelligence Committee was cleared by other agencies and done with the permission of the Intelligence Community. The selection of the documents was made by DOD to respond to the Committee's question.​

The Pentagon statement goes on to claim: "The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions."
This statement has confused, rather than clarified, the issues raised by the Feith memo.

The Saddam-Osama Memo (cont.)

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