Newsweek, in an article by Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, has come in to bat clean up on the Feith Memo and the whole purported Saddam-al Qaida link. They even note the same sputtering performance by Fred Barnes praising the thing on Fox over the weekend that TPM mentioned Sunday morning. (Hmmmm…) It’s good stuff. Definitely take a look.
The first, admittedly lengthy and multistoried, sentence sums it up:
A leaked Defense Department memo claiming new evidence of an âoperational relationshipâ between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Husseinâs former regime is mostly based on unverified claims that were first advanced by some top Bush administration officials more than a year agoâand were largely discounted at the time by the U.S. intelligence community, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.
Meanwhile, some are expressing the thought that whatâs happening here is that interested parties in the <$Ad$>Intelligence Community and national security bureaucracy are scheming to keep the truth from us about the existence of the Saddam-al Qaida link.
Now, anythingâs possible in this fallen world of ours. One never knows what the future holds. And certainly every possibility deserves to be looked into.
But sometimes simple logic can help give us a preview of what we might find.
The White House and various administration appointees bullied, pummeled and cajoled various members of the Intelligence Community into signing off on all manner of shaky, disputed, unsubstantiated and downright bogus intel because it suited the White House storyline. Now the same White House canât get the Intelligence Community to come clean about rock-solid intelligence demonstrating a Saddam-al Qaida link — information which, if revealed, would greatly bolster the White House?
That make sense to you?