Saturday, November 15, 2003

Iraq War: Critical Thinking Still Needed

The conservative, hawkish Weekly Standard has come up with a new "smoking gun" allegedly showing the connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Or a least a supposed top-secret report saying there was a virtual arseanal of smoking guns.

What, you say? That can't be! Didn't Administration officials spend a whole week back in September denying that there was any such connection?

Well, yes they did. At least denying links betwee Iraq and 9/11. But they keep bringing it up anyway. The Weekly Standard's new claim is based on a letter written by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, one of the main Iraq hawks. Feith was one of the prime movers in the cooked intelligence on the "weapons of mass destruction," which turned out to be non-existent. So no one should accept his claims on any intelligence information without confirmation from reliable sources. Although it's not clear that the Weekly Standard applies such scruples.

Part of the problem with the prewar intelligence on WMDs was that Pentagon hawks like Feith were getting intelligence claims from defectors and accepting it as valid without the normal vetting process that the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) would use.

It wouldn't be at all surprising if Feith's claims in this new letter are based on a similar procedure. Here, for instance, we have a claim from a captured al-Qaeda suspect:

<< During a custodial interview, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [a senior al Qaeda operative] said he was told by an al Qaeda associate that he was tasked to travel to Iraq (1998) to establish a relationship with Iraqi intelligence to obtain poisons and gases training. After the USS Cole bombing in 2000, two al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for CBW-related [Chemical and Biological Weapons] training beginning in Dec 2000. Iraqi intelligence was "encouraged" after the embassy and USS Cole bombings to provide this training. >>

This is pretty thin stuff, unless it's backed up by other verifiable information.

But the credibility gap that the Iraq War hawks have already created for themselves with weak and often false intelligence claims apparently isn't deterring Douglas Feith from pumping out more.


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