Iraq Had No Link With Al Qaeda

Spinsanity reviews the issue and says conservative pundits are spinning and "ignore questions about the reliability of the evidence contained in the memo, and unfairly generalize what the evidence suggests. In such a heated debate, commentators must note caveats about such information and fairly represent it to the public rather than making sweeping claims that distort the facts."

Christopher Scheer in the LA Times goes further - 'Evidence' for Link Is Administration Ploy

The leak and publication of the Feith memo, which selectively presented a few dozen raw intelligence items plucked from more than a decade of debriefings by national and foreign intelligence agencies, not only shows a certain desperation on the part of the administration to shore up support for the occupation, but it also fits squarely into the cynical pattern of abusing Americans' trust we have seen since 9/11.

"This is made to dazzle the eyes of [those] not terribly educated" about intelligence methods, said Greg Thielmann, a longtime veteran of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence who retired in late 2002.

For those who have watched this pattern, the modus operandi is familiar: Leak to the media or place in speeches intelligence nuggets of questionable value — aluminum tubes, Nigerian uranium, the undocumented Prague meeting — then retreat when pressed. Keep the story alive in the friendly pockets of the media, like William Safire's column or Fox News. When the factoid's cracks start showing, replace it with a new one. Repeat as needed.

Feith, who has been playing the cherry-picking role as an amateur intelligence chief for two years, could have just as easily gone into the mountains of intelligence data assembled every year to paint a picture of the much stronger links between Al Qaeda and the Saudi royal house, for example, or the Pakistani intelligence agency — both from nations that are our allies.

Al Qaeda didn't need Iraq to pull off 9/11 or any of its other savage attacks, and even if all the anonymous statements in Feith's memo panned out, there still would be no evidence Iraq significantly aided the extremists. We are, whatever the neocons might want us to believe, waging the wrong war in the wrong way.