Saddam and Osama tag-team match!

[reprehensor]

Ah the Weekly Standard, paragon of neo-con propaganda...

Mr Kristol... we're on to you...

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IRAQ AND AL QAEDA

In its cover story this week, The Weekly Standard presented classified intelligence data concerning the relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda.

The Standard article, written by Stephen F. Hayes and rather presumptuously entitled "Case Closed," is based on a classified letter sent by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It cites numerous reports of contacts between Iraqi officials and al Qaeda that appear to indicate an operational relationship between the two.
The article is posted here:

http://tinyurl.com/v2r5

But in a remarkable if oddly worded dismissal, the Pentagon stated that "News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are
inaccurate."

The Feith letter "was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions," the Pentagon said.

Furthermore, "Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal."

http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/2003/nr20031115-0642.html

It is in the nature of raw intelligence reports that they are susceptible to multiple interpretations, some more plausible than others. Even reliably accurate data can mean radically different things depending on the larger context. That is why intelligence reports are subjected to analysis, and not simply siphoned directly to policy makers. The Weekly Standard article in effect bypassed the analytical process, yielding a sensational but hardly conclusive result.

Stephen F. Hayes today responded to the Defense Department'sstatement regarding his story in the Weekly Standard online here:

http://tinyurl.com/voux
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From the Federation of American Scientists' 'Secrecy News'