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Intelligence historian Thomas Powers addresses the "Vanishing Case for War," in a New York Review of Books piece here:
"The invasion and conquest of Iraq by the United States last spring was the result of what is probably the least ambiguous case of the misreading of secret intelligence information in American history," Powers writes. "Whether it is even possible that a misreading so profound could yet be in some sense 'a mistake' is a question to which I shall return. Going to war was not something we were forced to do and it certainly was not something we were asked to do. It was something we elected to do for reasons that have still not been fully explained."
Newsweek terrorism-beat reporters Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff sift through the facts presented in the Feith memo, here, and find that many of the supposed facts presented have been contradicted by other evidence. For instance,:
--"Consider one of the seemingly more compelling reports
cited in the memo: that Farouk Hijazi, the former chief of
Iraqi intelligence and then ambassador to Turkey, flew to
Afghanistan in late 1998 to meet with bin Laden," Newsweek
writes. "As Stephen Hayes, author of The Weekly Standard
piece dutifully notes, accounts of this purported Saddam overture
to Osama made its way into the mainstream press at the time...
But, as Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official,
says, the Feith-Carney memo omits the rest of the story: that bin
Laden actually rejected the Hijazi overture, concluding he did not
want to be 'exploited' by a regime that he has consistently viewed
as 'secular' and fundamentally antithetical to his vision of a strict
Islamic state."
And on the circumstances surrounding the still unestablished case of whether Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, Newsweek writes:
--"The [Feith] memo invokes the by-now hoary claim—first
reported by Czech intelligence-that Mohammed Atta met
with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in April 2001. But
it concedes that the FBI and CIA 'cannot confirm' that such
a meeting actually took place. In fact, the Iraqi agent in
question, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, has been in
U.S. custody for months and, according to U.S. intelligence
sources, denies ever meeting Atta—a denial that officials
tend to believe given that they have not unearthed a scintilla
of evidence that Atta was even in Prague at the time of the
alleged rendezvous."
Do such slippery and contradictory 'facts' as described above establish the conclusive case of significant cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Usama Bin Laden as the the Weekly Standard claims? It sure doesn't seem very water-tight to me.
Meantime, the CIA has expanded its internal investigation into its own pre-war intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, USA Today reports.
--"CIA Director George Tenet has ordered investigators to
substantially widen their internal probe of Iraq intelligence
to consider whether the agency missed telltale signs that
Iraq had gotten rid of its weapons of mass
destruction before the U.S.-led invasion last March. The probe,
which has been conducted by a four-member
team of former senior CIA analysts since early this year,
was broadened this week."