WSJ: Moby Feith (Sen. Levin's obsessive and dishonest pursuit of Doug Feith)

Wall Street Journal ^ | October 25, 2004 | Editorial

[OESY]

...In Mr. Levin's telling, Mr. Feith is the Pentagon mastermind who cooked up false intelligence reports....

In doing so he had to ignore the conclusions of another report to which he also signed his name. The Senate Intelligence Committee, on which Mr. Levin serves, scrutinized the same set of events and issued a unanimous report in July completely exonerating Mr. Feith and his team.

...But the broad point -- that Mr. Feith's team concocted intelligence -- is preposterous. Early in 2002 a career-service analyst working on Mr. Feith's staff of 1,500 came across some old intelligence reports from 1995-'96 pointing to an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. Post-9/11 the potential value of such reports was higher than ever, and the analyst questioned whether the CIA was giving the earlier intelligence the weight it deserved in its current assessments. The discovery eventually made its way up to Secretary Rumsfeld, who arranged for then-CIA Director George Tenet to be briefed. Mr. Tenet was intrigued enough to order an unusual followup meeting between his staff and Mr. Feith's.

For this sin, Mr. Levin accuses Mr. Feith's team of "developing their own alternative intelligence analysis" and of "advocacy." Our own view is that the intelligence community could use more critical thinking of this sort and that the Defense queries sound like useful consumer feedback....

Finally, the Levin report raises a new accusation: that Mr. Feith deceived Congress about intelligence on Iraq's pre-war links to al Qaeda. Mr. Levin's reasoning is too tortured to rebut here, but it's worth noting a fatal flaw in his logic. Mr. Feith's alleged deception took place at the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004. That is, the events occurred after the invasion of Iraq, when they could have had no influence on the decision to go to war....

[jimtorr]

Mr. Levin's reasoning is too tortured .... fatal flaw in his logic. Mr. Feith's alleged deception took place at the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004. That is, the events occurred after the invasion of Iraq, when they could have had no influence on the decision to go to war

Since when is Sen. Levin guilty of practicing logic in his political diatribes?

[q_an_a]

what makes the NET and FreeRepublic so powerful is that everyday folks can know this data and figure out what it means. Levin is no longer the sole source of media time.