The Feith Memo Revisited
Scrapbook Much press attention was given last week to a report from the Department of Defense Inspector General. The IG report examined the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy,...
...All Things Considered, All The Time...
...The list goes on...
...In its place they began offering chat shows from the BBC and NPR round the clock, day after day...
...Once again the capital can enjoy a public radio station offering something its public audience can't get anywhere else: beautiful music, intelligently presented...
...Transcripts of telephone intercepts from senior Iraqi intelligence officials reporting their support for al Qaeda affiliates in northern Iraq...
...tion that for 50 years had broadcast classical music to the culture-starved residents of the nation's capital...
...Scrapbook Much press attention was given last week to a report from the Department of Defense Inspector General...
...But what's wrong with alternative analysis...
...Rockefeller's change of heart, for which The Scrapbook is profoundly grateful, proves contagious nationwide...
...Our complaint (see "Time for National Private Radio," February 28, 2005) was more than provincial pique, however...
...The Scrap-book will miss him...
...The people who actually had to fight the war had the audacity to conduct their own independent assessment of what we now know beyond cavil was the Intelligence Community's appallingly sparse and shoddy work...
...Some of the conclusions in the Feith Memo did not check out, as we suggested would happen from the beginning...
...Critics of the war are now celebrating the IG report both as a critique of the process by which Feith's office examined intelligence (it is that) and confirmation that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda (it is not...
...Classical music, in all its power and beauty, is an essential part of the cultural life of this city," said WETA's president, Sharon Percy Rockefeller...
...Last week's IG report—or at least the unclassified executive summary —also challenges the Feith Memo on substance...
...Ralph de Toledano, 1916-2007_ We note with sorrow the death last week of 90-year-old Ralph de Toledano, the author, editor, musician, syndicated columnist, raconteur, and scholar of jazz who was a fixture in the modern conservative movement in its formative years...
...Yet he never lost his droll sense of humor, encyclopedic knowledge of popular music, or commitment to the writer's trade, and was for years a welcome fixture at the National Press Club bar...
...Feith and his unit engaged in critical thinking (can't have that...
...and allegedly failed to register their disagreements in a fashion consistent with Intelligence Community protocols (i.e., the governing standards under which, in just the last two decades, the IC has missed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of India as a nuclear power, etc...
...He's both right and wrong...
...custody since 1995...
...For whatever reason—a marked decline in subscriptions and fund-raising, perhaps—WETA's directors reversed themselves and chucked the chit-chat...
...What Carl Levin and others would have us believe is that because the Feith analysis deviated from that of the intelligence community, the Feith analysis was wrong and there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda...
...A document captured in postwar Iraq showing that the Iraqi regime harbored and financed Abdul Rahman Yasin, a key figure in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center...
...It was a criticism of that consensus...
...The document, first reported in this magazine ("Case Closed," by Stephen F. Hayes, November 24, 2003), became known as the "Feith Memo...
...The IG report examined the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, and its work on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda...
...Like many on the intellectual right, he began his journey on the anti-Communist left, first as a precocious Columbia undergraduate in the 1930s, then on the staff of the New Leader and, after wartime service, as an official of the American Veterans Committee and publicist for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union...
...Just what the capital needed: more talk...
...It was the Alger Hiss spy case, which he covered for Newsweek, that finally pushed him across the aisle, where he found safe haven as a regular contributor to the fledgling National Review, as an early television pundit, and popular columnist for King Features Syndicate...
...The inspector general found that Feith's office engaged in alternative intelligence analysis (i.e., not emanating from the CIA) and deemed those activities "inappropriate...
...As this magazine reported at the time, there is no question that the Feith shop was conducting analysis, their denials notwithstanding...
...But others are hard to explain away...
...He told the FBI that Abu Hajer al Iraqi, described by another al Qaeda member as Osama bin Laden's best friend, had a good relationship with Iraqi Intelligence...
...Or, as Feith himself put it: Of course his memo "varied from [the] consensus...
...Remember the intelligence community consensus that Baathists and jihadists would not collaborate because of their ideological differences...
...The FBI debriefing of Wali Khan Amin Shah, a senior al Qaeda operative in U.S...
...As always, Michigan senator Carl Levin is dishonestly leading the charge...
...That was our point, too...
...Intelligence cited by the Clinton administration that Iraqi chemical weapons scientists were working with al Qaeda-linked Sudanese military officials in the 1990s...
...Now, incrementally and unilaterally, a new generation of programmers was transforming it into the nation's first government-funded news service...
...Shudder...
...Born in Tangier into a prominent Sephardic family, his parents brought him to America when he was five, and he studied music and was a legendary editor of the Columbia Jester, the college humor magazine, before his interests shifted to politics...
...As Levin pushes to declassify the IG report, we hope he'll join our calls for declassification of a few other items...
...The report says that the Feith office "did not provide 'the most accurate analysis of intelligence' to senior decisionmakers...
...In the fall of 2003, the office produced a 50-point bulleted list detailing contacts and cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda...
...As we pointed out then, public radio had been originally conceived as a service for preserving and encouraging minority tastes ignored by the market—particularly in the arts, not only in classical music but also in jazz, bluegrass, cabaret, and folk...
...That is why it was written...
...And then last month, just as suddenly, the nightmare ended, locally at least...
...Suddenly, in February 2005, the directors had unilaterally decided to discontinue classical programming...
...That seems rather quaint given the daily, deadly Baathist-jihad-ist collaboration in Baghdad today...
...Now seems like a good time to point out that the intelligence community itself did not provide the most accurate intelligence either...
...As former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy asks in National Review: What was so "inappropriate...
...Let's hope Mrs...
...Above all, Ralph was a character...
...In abandoning classical Welcome Back, WETA It's almost two years now since our editors got up on their hind legs, climbed the pulpit, and denounced, with unwonted ferocity, the directors of WETA-FM, the public radio stamusic for news programming, WETA joined a nationwide trend among the country's loose-knit network of public radio stations...
Vol. 12 • February 2007 • No. 22
