Iraq - al Qaeda Contacts Leak Smells of Neocon Desperation

The leaked memo consists mainly of 50 excerpts culled from raw intelligence reports by four US intelligence agencies about alleged al-Qaeda-Iraqi contacts from 1990 to 2003.

Some of the reports include brief analysis, but most cite accounts by unnamed sources, such as "a contact with good access," "a well placed source," "a former senior Iraqi intelligence officer," a "regular and reliable source," "sensitive CIA reporting," and "a foreign government service."

Although the article's author, Weekly Standard correspondent Stephen Hayes, concludes that much of the evidence is "detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources," the only example of real corroboration is with respect to several reports regarding contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraqi agents in Afghanistan in 1999.

W. Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Washington Post the article amounted to 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."

At the same time, he added, it raises the question: "If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?"

Other retired officers stressed that, to the extent that virtually all of the excerpts consist of raw intelligence unvetted by professional analysts, the article appeared to prove precisely what critics had been saying: Feith's office simply picked those items in raw intelligence that tended to confirm their preexisting views that a relationship must have existed, without subjecting the evidence to the kind of rigorous analysis that intelligence agencies would apply.

"This is made to dazzle the eyes of the not terribly educated," Greg Thielmann, a veteran of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) who retired in 2002, told IPS.