The NY Times Continues to Understate the Influence of Feith's "Gestapo
Office" in the Run-up to War

By Walter C. Uhler
Created Dec 4 2006 - 8:54am

In his ground-breaking April 28, 2004, New York Times article about Douglas
Feith's Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCEG) - which Secretary of
State Colin Powell privately called "Feith's Gestapo office" - James Risen
detailed the Group's efforts to find links connecting Saddam Hussein with al
Qeada's terrorists, in order to make a clearer case for the invasion of
Iraq. As Mr. Risen notes, both the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA
discounted (had already examined and dismissed) the so-called evidence that
the Gestapo office was "uncovering."

But rather than demonstrating that the Gestapo office actually prevailed
over the legitimate and ultimately correct Intelligence Community, and thus
provided a central justification for war, Risen then undercut his reporting
by erroneously concluding that "the Bush administration ultimately decided
that the terrorism link was not strong enough to use as the central
rationale for war."

Now, Mr. Risen has done it again, in his November 28, 2006 Times puff piece
on Chris Carney, the recently elected Democratic Congressman from
Pennsylvania -- and former member of Feith's Gestapo office. Rather than
using the occasion to reexamine the impact of the Gestapo office, by
grilling Congressman-elect Carney, Mr. Risen gave him a platform for
dismissing the affair.

Which is why I wrote the following (unpublished) letter to the Times on
November 28, 2006:

James Risen writes about Chris Carney's role as a member of Douglas
Feith's Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCEG), which gathered and
disseminated evidence (subsequently shown to be false) linking Iraq to al
Qaeda. According to Risen, Mr. Carney now assesses the probability of that
link to be 2.5 out of 10. Left unasked was whether Carney reported his weak
2.5 assessment to Mr. Feith in 2002.

Mr. Risen also fails to mention the five legitimate Intelligence Community
(IC) reports, dating from September 2001 to January 2003, which found no
significant operational Iraq-al Qaeda links. Knowledge of these reports
requires us to ask why the PCEG's erroneous briefings trumped the ultimately
correct IC reports, which Vice President Cheney dismissed as "crap."
Presumably a congress controlled by Democrats will ask why.

Finally, Mr. Risen errs when he asserts that "the Iraq-al Qaeda connection
gradually faded as a major talking point" of the Bush administration. When?
Certainly, not before the invasion!

In September 2002, Mr. Cheney called such ties "clearly official policy"
on the part of Iraq. In his now infamous Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the United
Nations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State Colin
Powell added: "But what I want to bring to your attention today is the
potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist
network." Finally, on March 1, 2003, just weeks before authorizing the
invasion, President Bush asserted: "This dictator will not be allowed to
intimidate and blackmail the civilized world, or supply his terrible weapons
to terrorist groups."

Walter C. Uhler

Even the cursory evidence presented in my letter demonstrates the
significance of the Iraq-al Qaeda link in the Bush administration's
propaganda for war. And it also helps to explain why so many Americans today
still believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the al Qaeda attacks on
9/11.

Moreover, the issue of who led Americans astray into an illegal and immoral
war is not a simple matter of Republicans versus Democrats. Many Democrats
failed to even read the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate before
giving away their votes to support an immoral, illegal invasion of Iraq.
Today, many of those Democrats find themselves hamstrung, limited to
discussing the incompetence with which the invasion was carried out, rather
than the Bush administration's fraud justifying invasion or their own
failure to expose that fraud.

Mr. Carney, judging by Risen's puff piece, would like to do the very same
thing. But, we simply cannot permit politics to trump the pursuit of the
truth - especially if America is to reclaim the moral high ground in the
eyes of the world.

Let the investigations begin!

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson