Special Report & Slides Released on Pre-Iraq War Intel

By Andrew Cochran

Sen. Carl Levin, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, today released a newly declassified report of the Department of Defense Inspector General about the intelligence activities of Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, before the Iraq War. Sen. Levin also released declassified slides which Under Secretary Feith used to brief the President and senior staff on the alleged relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The slides include a checklist of shared "objectives" with the notation, "Intelligence indicates cooperation in all categories; mature, symbiotic relationship,” and the last page has a bullet point stating, "Multiple areas of cooperation." The IG report confirms that the intelligence community did not find any operational relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda and that “the CIA and DIA disavowed any ‘mature, symbiotic’ relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida.” The IG concluded that Under Secretary Feith's briefings included "conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community," and that his actions were "inappropriate." You can download the IG report here and the slides here. Much of the slide presentation is still redacted as a matter of security. Newsweek released a portion of the slides in a story in January 2006 on the MSNBC site, but this is the first release of the entire slide presentation. You can read a transcript of a Fox News Channel interview in February with Feith on the Fox News site.

This closes one of the last outstanding loops in an issue which has no apparent future. I last posted on this issue on November 3 (with links to previous posts).

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