Dan Darling, at Regnum Crucis, has an excellent analysis of an article in the NYT detailing the extraordinary intelligence work accomplished by the DIA team set up by Douglas Feith. A key passage:
Ignoring the fact that "murky" [the term used by the CIA in a report on the Iraq-Qaeda "relationship"] is a very different thing from "non-existent" or "emnity" as some have alleged, I suspect that Zarqawi's little trip to Baghdad in the spring of 2002 served as a catalyst to start up revisiting some of Feith's research on Iraq and al-Qaeda.The main dispute was over whether the reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda meant that Iraq had been sponsoring the group's terrorist operations."We believed in contact, offers of safe haven, but no operational activity," the intelligence official said.
By way of background the reader might also want to check out threse two Weekly Standard articles by Steven Hayes:
Case Closed, and
Newsweek's "Case", as well as the following Slate article by Jay Epstein:
I think the "The Fourth Estate" is beginning to get the theme that they're increasingly irrelevant unless they start taking their own carefully tended memes a little less seriously. We may actually end up with a halfway decent press, somewhere down the road.
Posted by Demosophist at April 28, 2004 12:25 PM | TrackBack