The Demo Memo

And the Feith memo....

Fair and balanced Fox News has reported extensively this month on the Senate Intelligence Committee. The two big stories are (1) that the Democrats on the Committee are politicizing its work (by calling for a broader investigation than the Republican leadership desires), and (2) that the Committee has received a blockbuster report from the Defense Department documenting ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

...Fox rages against Senator Jay Rockefeller, ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, and his staff for politicizing the Committee's work. What, specifically, does this mean? It seems that Rockefeller has insisted that the Committee scrutinize not only the CIA's collection of information, but that amassed (or generated) by the Office of Special Plans.

...Now, very few Americans have ever heard of the Office of Special Plans, and Fox no doubt wants to keep it that way. This was the office created last spring, after the CIA and DIA kept telling Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz that they just couldn't come up with any links between 9-11 and Saddam Hussein. Created in Spring 2002 and peopled by former Congressional staffers (rather than intelligence operatives), it was charged with "thinking outside the box" and rethinking information rejected by intelligence professionals in order to make a case for war. Its business was what Greg Thielmann, former proliferation expert in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and now a principled critic of Bushite disinformation, called "faith-based intelligence." It was headed by Straussian neocons William Luti and Abe Shulsky, who are on record as advocating the use of noble lies to create public opinion that serves the policy agendas of the warmongering Wise.

How political! accused patriotic Sean. How dare Rockefeller try to politicize the issue of the official rationale for war with Iraq ? To investigate the possibility that what everyone with a brain now understands to have been, at minimum, "flawed" or "hyped" intelligence, might actually have been deliberate disinformation----now, that's a politicizing type of inquiry. Shame on Rockefeller! Praise be, meanwhile, unto Office of Special Plans boss Douglas Feith, author of yet another "leaked" memo falling into the hands of Fox News anchors via the Weekly Standard.

The Weekly Standard tendentiously titles its screed "Case Closed," as if to demand an end to the discussion. Alas for the neocons and their noble lies, a Washington Post piece by Walter Pincus November 18 cast doubt on the leaked memo's blockbuster annex:

W. Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of the DIA, said yesterday that the Standard article "is a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?"

Another former senior intelligence official said the memo is not an intelligence product but rather "data points . . . among the millions of holdings of the intelligence agencies, many of which are simply not thought likely to be true."

The Defense Department itself, interestingly enough, issued a statement declaring that the annex to Feith's memo outlining "the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida" in fact "drew no conclusions." The statement concludes: "Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal."

So Fox has both trashed an apparently honest effort to expose government deceit paving the way for a bloody imperialist war; and also promoted distorted "intelligence" information (in typical neocon fashion) to desperately justify that disaster. The crudity of its effort obliged the Defense Department itself to step in and clarify. All in a week's time.  article