(2007-02-10) Pentagon Ig Iraq Intel

The Pentagon Inspector General has released a report on the Intelligence Community mess leading up to the War On Iraq. The report said the team headed by Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, developed "alternative" assessments of intelligence on Iraq that contradicted the intelligence community and drew conclusions "that were not supported by the available intelligence."... The inspector general did not recommend criminal charges against Mr. Feith because Mr. Donald Rumsfeld or his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, approved their subordinate's "inappropriate" operations. The renegade intelligence buff said he was relieved... The false information included a meeting in Prague in April 2001 between an Iraqi official and Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 pilots. It never happened. But Mr. Feith's report said it did, and Mr. Dick Cheney will still not admit that the story is false. In a statement released yesterday, Senator Carl Levin, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been dogged in pursuit of the truth about the Iraqi intelligence, noted that the cooked-up Feith briefing had been leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine so Mr. Cheney could quote it as the "best source" of information about the supposed Iraq-Qaeda link.... The Pentagon report is one step in a long-delayed effort to figure out how the intelligence on Iraq was so badly twisted - and by whom. That work should have been finished before the 2004 elections, and it would have been if PatRoberts, the obedient Republican who ran the Senate Intelligence Committee, had not helped the White House drag it out and load it in ways that would obscure the truth.