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WASHINGTON - Former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld's top policy aide produced "inappropriate" intelligence reports linking Saddam Hussein and the Al-Qaeda terror network to bolster the case for war with Iraq, according to a Pentagon investigation.
The work done by the Pentagon office headed by Douglas Feith was "inappropriate," though neither illegal nor unauthorized, according to portions of a classified report released Friday by Democratic Senator Carl Levin.
The report is a "devastating condemnation" of the office headed by former undersecretary of defense Feith, a civilian, who had a key role in drumming up domestic and international political support for invading Iraq in 2003, said Levin in a statement.
Levin will hear Friday from Department of Defense Inspector General Thomas Gimble, who is scheduled to present the investigation's classified findings to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which the senator chairs.
The Pentagon investigation focused on the Policy Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, created by then-deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States to look for state sponsors of terrorism.
The office "developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al-Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community, to senior decision-makers," the unclassified summary of the report said.
The report refers to allegations made by Feith in 2002 and 2003 that Saddam had active links to Al-Qaeda, allegations used by the administration of President George W. Bush to link the invasion of Iraq to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
The report said that Feith's intelligence activities had been authorized by Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz, Levin said.
Feith's reports were used by top government officials including Vice President Dick Cheney.
"Indeed, Vice President Cheney said the principal Feith office assessment was the 'best source of information' on the alleged relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda," Levin said.
Feith, who resigned his Pentagon post in 2005 to take up a post at Georgetown University in Washington, lashed back at critics and said the report vindicates him.
"The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations that its pre-Iraq war work was somehow 'unlawful' or 'unauthorized' and that some information it gave to congressional committees was deceptive or misleading," he said in a statement.
"The inspector general's report has now thoroughly repudiated the smears."
However Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democrat that heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that Feith may have violated the 1947 National Security Act by failing to keep congress informed.
"The IG (Inspector General) has concluded that (Feith's) office was engaged in intelligence activities. The Senate Intelligence Committee was never informed of these activities," Rockefeller said in a statement.
"Whether these actions were authorized or not, it appears that they were not in compliance with the law," he said.
Eric Edelman, Feith's successor at the Pentagon and a former Cheney aide, said in a rebuttal to the report that Wolfowitz asked Feith's analysts to ignore the intelligence community's belief that the radical Islamist Al-Qaeda and Saddam's secular dictatorship were unlikely allies.
Feith's unit was one of three offices that received intelligence on Iraq as the Bush administration made its case for ousting Saddam, Edelman said.
The office delivered three separate reports, none of which was an "assessment of any sort," according to Edelman's rebuttal.
The strongest evidence Feith's office produced linking Saddam and Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda was an alleged meeting in April 2001 in Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence officer and Mohamed Atta, who led the deadly September 11 attacks months later.
At the time the CIA had doubts about the meeting, and both the CIA and the FBI later concluded it never took place.
The bipartisan September 11 commission that issued a lengthy report in 2004 on events leading up to the 2001 terror attacks found no evidence linking Al-Qaeda to Saddam's regime in Iraq.
02/10/2007 18:58 GMT
