US official used 'dubious' Iraq intelligence

Published on Saturday 10 February 2007 00:24

A LEADING figure in the Bush administration's march to war in Iraq used questionable intelligence about Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaeda to help justify the 2003 invasion, a US defence watchdog said yesterday.

The former US defence policy chief Douglas Feith's view that there was a "mature symbiotic relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaeda was inconsistent with the intelligence community's view, a damning report by the Pentagon's inspector general said.

Thomas Gimble, the acting inspector general who produced the classified report after a one-year investigation, said Mr Feith had been authorised by senior Pentagon officials to pursue alternative intelligence analyses and his actions were lawful.

But his actions were sometimes "inappropriate" because they "did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intelligence community", an unclassified two-page executive summary of his report said.

Leading officials, including Dick Cheney, the vice-president, used claims of a relationship between al-Qaeda and pre-war Iraq to suggest that Saddam could have had a role in the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Senior officials at the time, including Donald Rumsfeld, then defence secretary, were unhappy the CIA assessment did not more closely link Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate armed services committee, said: "The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation.

"The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the department of defence."

He cited the report's findings that Mr Feith's office was, despite doubts expressed by the intelligence community, pushing the line that an Iraqi spy had met the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Prague and that there were "multiple areas of cooperation" between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

"That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the American people about the need to go to war," Mr Levin said.However, independent inquiries, including one by the official 11 September commission, found no collaborative links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Mr Feith, who left the government in 2005, said he welcomed the finding that his activities had been legal and authorised, but said it was "an absurd position" to say his activities were inappropriate. "It, of course, varied from [the] consensus. It was a criticism of that consensus. That is why it was written," he said.