The Douglas Feith memo that became the basis on the Weekly Standard's cover story on Saddam/Bin Laden connections has not been impressing the war critics in the "blogosphere." Or the Defense Department.
CalPundit and Hesiod both link to this Department of Defense (DoD) response to the Weekly Standard article. DoD's comments indicate that the claims in Feith's letter - or at least in the Weekly Standard's spin on it - were, as CalPundit summarized it, without great merit. (He phrases it somewhat more strongly.)
Josh Marshall explains that the article actually contained no new claims. The DoD statement confirms this: "News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate."
2 comments:
juan cole has a good post on this yesterday, it's a long link, i'm not typing it here, but it's an early a.m. entry 11/18. i find his analysis of things to usually be calm, clear, level-headed.
Juan Cole is a consistently good resource on the Iraq War. He knows Arabic, so he can read the Arabic-language news sources, he has his own contacts in Iraq from his scholarly work and he's an expert on Shi'a Islam. So both the news he passes along and his analysis are often refreshingly different from what we get elsewhere. - Bruce
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