The Washington Post reports that Democratic committee chairmen plan to go on the attack when the new congress convenes after the first of the year.
Incoming Democratic committee chairmen say they will hold a series of hearings and investigations early next year to build the case for their call for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and for possible action against defense contractors found to have wasted billions in federal funds.
Among the vindications Democrats seek for themselves is their claim that no connection ever existed between Saddam Hussein and Islamic terrorism. Senator Carl M. Levin, Democrat from Michigan plans to revisit his dispute over the issue with former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith.
Levin says Feith exaggerated the relationship between Hussein's government and al-Qaeda when the Bush administration was trying to build public support for the Iraq invasion.
The administration's repeated refusal to give Levin 58 documents related to Feith's activities is about to be tested. "We're entitled to those documents," Levin said. "If necessary, I intend to subpoena those documents."
There has been this apparent presumption that favoring the overthrow of Saddam Hussein automatically makes one incapable of honestly assessing his connection to the terrorists, even though toppling his regime had been an official aim of U.S. policy starting in 1998 during the Clinton administration. Because Feith was among those who favored Saddam's overthrow, he and his team are not merely suspect. They are presumed guilty of misrepresenting evidence of those ties. Here is James Risen reporting in the New York Times in April 2004.
Some intelligence experts charge that the unit had a secret agenda to justify a war with Iraq and was staffed with people who were handpicked by conservative Pentagon policy makers to arrive at preordained conclusions about Iraq and Al Qaeda.
"I don't have any problem with them bringing in a couple of people to take another look at the intelligence and challenge the assessments," said Patrick Lang, a former Middle East analyst for the D.I.A. "But the problem is that they brought in people who were not intelligence professionals, people brought in because they thought like them. They knew what answers they were going to get."
Mr. Feith defends his analysts. "I would be happy to have anybody come in and examine the quality of the work, whether it is supported by the data, whether it is logical, whether it is well-reasoned," he said.
Well, apparently Feith will get his wish. The quality of his team's work will be examined, but what will the good Senators find? It may very well be that intelligence had been twisted. In fact Feith team member Michael Maloof made just that accusation, except he was accusing the intelligence community.
"We had to justify every single connection we made," he said. "But the intelligence community had preconceived notions, and if the information didn't fit into those notions, then they simply ignored it."
Here's an interesting timeline. Feith's team was formed shortly after September 11, 2001. It presented its findings to Paul D. Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, in November 2001. In December 2001 team member Maloof was stripped of his security clearance.
Mr. Maloof's Pentagon career was damaged in December 2001, when his security clearances were revoked. He was accused of having unauthorized contact with a foreign national, a woman he had met while traveling in the Republic of Georgia and eventually married. Mr. Maloof said he complied with all requirements to disclose the relationship. Several intelligence professionals say he came under scrutiny because of suspicions that he had leaked classified information in the past to the news media, a charge that Mr. Maloof denies. His lawyer, Sam Abady says that Mr. Maloof was a target because of his controversial intelligence work and political ties to conservative Pentagon leaders.
An appeals board reinstated his clearances after Mr. Feith and Mr. Perle wrote letters to the D.I.A. But the intervention angered some intelligence officials, and a second panel reversed course in April 2003. Mr. Maloof is now on paid leave.
Mr. Maloof was not alone in his suspicion of agency manipulations.
Mr. Feith, meanwhile, was eager to continue the work and turned it over to two D.I.A. analysts detailed to him. In the spring and summer of 2002, Christina Shelton, another agency analyst assigned to him, was reviewing old intelligence reports on Al Qaeda when she saw patterns suggesting connections between the Baghdad regime and the group. She became infuriated when one agency official told her that pursuing such leads "would only help Wolfowitz," a Pentagon official recalled.
So Feith, Bush, and Cheney are presumed guilty of ignoring or misrepresenting evidence regarding Saddam's ties to terrorism, yet no one in the Administration ever claimed that Feith found anything more than indications of contact.
"New information has come to light," Mr. Cheney said. "And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the one hand, and the Al Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years.
Despite Mr. Cheney's assertions and the efforts of Mr. Feith's office, the Bush administration ultimately decided that the terrorism link was not strong enough to use as the central justification for war with Iraq.
Evidence uncovered after Douglas J. Feith and his team conducted their analysis shows that Saddam Hussein actively supported Islamic terrorism. Steven Hayes of the Weekly Standard reported in January of this year on the recent findings from the DOCEX project.
THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.
We already knew that families of Palestinian suicide bombers were each entitled to a $25,000 bonus complements of Saddam. So what does Senator Levin hope to accomplish? Could he harbor the suspicion that it was really the intelligence agencies who were ignoring evidence? I doubt it. My take is that the Democrats expect substantial political gains will accrue to them if they successfully discredit America's invasion and liberation of Iraq. My take is that Democrats will work to turn Iraq into a decisive Republican defeat in any way they can. The mainstream press will continue to play along.
