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Feith-Based IntelligenceThe former undersecretary of defense's preposterous self-defense.

By Daniel Benjamin
Posted Thursday, March 8, 2007, at 7:02 PM ET
Douglas Feith. Click image to expand.

The Pentagon's acting inspector general says that prewar intelligence assessments prepared by former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith about the relationship between al-Qaida and Iraq were "inappropriate" because Feith failed to make clear how his conclusions diverged from those of the intelligence community. Feith counters that this work was nothing more than a "critique" of the CIA's judgments. The CIA, he says, had concluded that al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein had divergent interests and therefore were unlikely to collaborate to attack the United States. That assessment, Feith and others believed, was belied by information that the intelligence community had itself collected, and his office's work was aimed, as he told National Public Radio, "to prevent an intelligence failure."

However you characterize them, Feith's assessments were entirely wrong. Every serious post-mortem of the relationship between al-Qaida and Saddam's government has confirmed the original CIA conclusions. But Feith's claim that his work was a dispassionate endeavor at unbiased analysis—the very model of good government double-teaming—doesn't jibe with the recollections of people in various parts of the Defense Department and in the broader intelligence community during this period. Nor does it match what I've learned about the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, the office Feith set up to do this work at the behest of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. In numerous interviews for The Next Attack, a book I wrote with Steven Simon, senior officials, including Feith's fellow political appointees, portrayed an effort in which Feith, Wolfowitz, and some of their subordinates tried to sell the claim that the CIA had it wrong and that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam were collaborators.

From the outset—indeed, well before 9/11—Wolfowitz disputed that al-Qaida was as much of a threat as the CIA leadership and then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke claimed. After the attacks on New York and Washington, the CIA decided fairly quickly based on a large body of intelligence that Iraq had nothing to do with the "planes operation." But top civilian Defense Department officials refused to accept this verdict, incessantly demanding re-examinations of the al-Qaida-Iraq relationship. In itself, such skepticism is not a bad thing. But these officials' refusal to accept the answer that emerged from extensive re-evaluation suggests they weren't particularly open-minded. One political appointee in another agency who dealt with Wolfowitz regularly told me that among the intelligence officials who conducted morning briefings of top officials, "It was a joke that Wolfowitz's briefer came back every morning and hit F5, the save-get key on the computer that sent out the message saying, 'investigate al-Qaida-Iraq, al Qaida-Iraq.' "

Wolfowitz and Feith's certainty that there was an al-Qaida link—and the overarching belief that all bad Muslims were bad together, with Saddam sitting at the center of the spider's web—had a pernicious effect on analysis and policy-making. Career intelligence and counterterrorism officials were sidelined for doubting the Wolfowitz/Feith line; others were pressured to endorse them. One former top counterterrorism official says that after remarking that he did not think much of the work of Laurie Mylroie, an Iraq analyst and favorite of such neoconservatives as Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Wolfowitz, he was shunted aside. Later, on a tip, he dropped by a conference room near Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office and found a Navy reserve officer working on a large swath of what looked like butcher-block paper that had been pinned to the wall. Drawn on it was a tangle of lines and drawings that, he said, looked like "spaghetti." When he asked the reservist, presumably part of the CTEG operation, what he was doing, the reservist replied, "I was asked to show the connection between Saddam and [Bin Laden]."

"Were you asked to show if there was a connection?"

"No, I was told to show the connection."

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Daniel Benjamin served on the national security staff from 1994 to 1999 and is the author, with Steven Simon, of The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right.
Photograph of former Under Secretary for Defense Douglas Feith by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.
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