Clinton was speaking about the Oklahoma City bombing with respect to
what you snipped. The way Kerry relates to Clinton's statement is
as follows. One man chooses to express his hatred against the
government by throwing his war hero metals over a fense while
another man chooses to express his hatred for the government by
blowing up a government building.

M. Clark

L.A. TIMES
WASHINGTON - A controversial intelligence unit set up in the Pentagon
provided skewed prewar analysis to support Bush administration claims that
Saddam Hussein was an ally of Al Qaeda, an investigation by Democrats on

Senate Armed Services Committee has found.

The intelligence unit, run by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas
J. Feith, shaded analytic judgments, ignored contrary evidence and
sidestepped the CIA to present dubious findings to senior officials at the
White House, the investigation concluded.

The report was released Thursday by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) after a
16-month inquiry conducted by Democratic staff members on the committee.
Levin has been a persistent critic of Feith and the Bush administration on
Iraq.

The report concluded that "intelligence relating to the Iraq-Al Qaeda
relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the [Department

Defense] to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq."

Republicans criticized the report as politically motivated. "Sen. Levin's
report is clearly a partisan effort to influence the upcoming election
rather than an attempt to correct the flaws in our intelligence

said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican on the Senate Armed Services
Committee.

The Defense Department issued a statement saying other investigations had
found no evidence of wrongdoing by Feith's office, and that Levin's report
appeared to "depart from the bipartisan, consultative relationship"

the Pentagon and Congress.

Feith, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration, was a

proponent of the war in Iraq, and was in charge of postwar planning. He

said that his office created the intelligence unit - the Counterterrorism
Evaluation Group - shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks to conduct a broad
examination of state sponsors of terrorism.

The unit focused much of its energy on finding a link between Hussein and

Qaeda. Subsequent investigations, including that of the independent
bipartisan Sept. 11 commission, have concluded that although there were
contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, there was no evidence of a

relationship or Iraqi involvement in the Sept. 11 plot.

Much of the material in Levin's report has been previously disclosed. But
the 46-page document includes new details that, according to Levin, show

Feith's analysts repeatedly sought to outflank the CIA, which was much

skeptical of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties.

The report found that the Defense analysts tailored presentations to
different audiences, making a more aggressive case when briefing senior
officials at the Pentagon and the White House than when showing their
findings to senior CIA officers.

At the White House, for instance, Pentagon briefers included a slide
describing "known Al Qaeda contacts," and listing an alleged meeting in
Prague between Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence
agent.

Levin said that far from being a known example of contacts between Iraq

Al Qaeda, there was widespread doubt in the intelligence community that

meeting ever occurred. Nevertheless, he said, the claim was included in

Sept. 16, 2002, White House briefing even though it was not part of a
previous presentation made to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and other
senior officials at agency headquarters.

The report also cites instances in which Pentagon analysts failed to fully
comply with CIA requests that exaggerated claims be deleted or corrected.

one case, the CIA warned Feith's office against using a claim that

regime knew that suspected terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi had entered Iraq,
saying the assertion was "unsupported" by the intelligence cited.

Rather than remove the long-disputed claim, the Pentagon intelligence unit
left it unchanged and "cited a different CIA report in support of [the]
assertion," Levin's report said.

Levin said distortions by analysts working for Feith fueled many of the

administration's most controversial claims as it made its case for war. In
particular, he noted that Vice President ***** Cheney referred to a

article cataloging many of the Feith team's controversial findings as the
"best source of information" on the relationship between Iraq and Al

"It wasn't the best source," Levin said. "It was an inaccurate,

source which the CIA insisted be corrected."