Intelligence, The Feith WayAs I mentioned over at TPM, today Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) released a declassifed version (pdf) of the briefing slides Doug Feith’s office used to sell the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda to White House officials in 2002.
Feith, remember, ran the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy, an office tasked in the runup to the Iraq War with making the case that a relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
It’s a remarkable document in a number of ways. First, although Feith, unrepetant as always, has claimed that what his office was doing wasn’t intelligence analysis, but “criticsm,” the briefing is titled, “Assessing the Relationship between Iraq and al Qaida.”
Second, the philosophy behind Feith’s shop is on full display on a slide titled, “Fundamental Problems with How Intelligence Community is Assessing Information”:
In the slide, the briefer complains about the lofty standard of proof of the intelligence community, which had led to a consensus that Iraq and al Qaeda did not have a significant relationship — as opposed to the “mature, symbiotic relationship” touted by Feith’s shop in one slide. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” the slide reads. After all, this was only a case for war.
And just to see it for yourself, in this slide Feith’s office pushes the widely discredited claim that 9/11 attacker Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraq spy in 2000.