By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military

Pentagon officials undercut the intelligence community in the run-up
to the U.S. invasion of Iraq by insisting in briefings to the White
House that there was a clear relationship between Saddam Hussein and
al-Qaida, the Defense Department’s inspector general said Friday.

Acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble told the Senate Armed
Services Committee that the office headed by former Pentagon policy
chief Douglas J. Feith took “inappropriate” actions in advancing
conclusions on al-Qaida connections not backed up by the nation’s
intelligence agencies.

Gimble said that while the actions of the Office of the Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy “were not illegal or unauthorized,”
they “did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to
senior decision makers” at a time when the White House was moving
toward war with Iraq.

“I can’t think of a more devastating commentary,” said Armed
Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record),
D-Mich.

He cited Gimble’s findings that Feith’s office was, despite doubts
expressed by the intelligence community, pushing conclusions that Sept.
11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in
Prague five months before the attack, and that there were “multiple
areas of cooperation” between Iraq and al-Qaida, including shared
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

“That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the
American people about the need to go to war,” Levin said in an
interview Thursday. He said the Pentagon’s work, “which was wrong,
which was distorted, which was inappropriate … is something which is
highly disturbing.”

Rep. Ike Skelton (news, bio, voting record), D-Mo., chairman of the
House Armed Services Committee, said Friday the report “clearly shows
that Doug Feith and others in that office exercised extremely poor
judgment for which our nation, and our service members in particular,
are paying a terrible price.”

Republicans on the panel disagreed. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said
the “probing questions” raised by Feith’s policy group improved the
intelligence process.

“I’m trying to figure out why we are here,” said Sen. Saxby
Chambliss (news, bio, voting record), R-Ga., saying the office was
doing its job of analyzing intelligence that had been gathered by the
CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Gimble responded that at issue was that the information supplied by
Feith’s office in briefings to the National Security Council and the
office of Vice President Dick Cheney was “provided without caveats”
that there were varying opinions on its reliability.

Gimble’s report said Feith’s office had made assertions “that were
inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community.”

At the White House, spokesman Dana Perino said President Bush has
revamped the U.S. spy community to try avoiding a repeat of flawed
intelligence affecting policy decisions by creating a director of
national intelligence and making other changes.

“I think what he has said is that he took responsibility, and that
the intel was wrong, and that we had to take measures to revamp the
intel community to make sure that it never happened again,” Perino told
reporters.

Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman denied that the office
was producing its own intelligence products, saying they were
challenging what was coming in from intelligence-gathering
professionals, “looking at it with a critical eye.”

Some Democrats also have contended that Feith misled Congress about
the basis of the administration’s assertions on the threat posed by
Iraq, but the Pentagon investigation did not support that.

In a telephone interview Thursday, Levin said the IG report is “very
damning” and shows a Pentagon policy shop trying to shape intelligence
to prove a link between al-Qaida and Saddam.

Levin in September 2005 had asked the inspector general to determine
whether Feith’s office’s activities were appropriate, and if not, what
remedies should be pursued.

The 2004 report from the Sept. 11 commission found no evidence of a
collaborative relationship between Saddam and Osama bin Laden’s
al-Qaida terror organization before the U.S. invasion.

Asked to comment on the IG’s findings, Feith said in a
telephone interview that he had not seen the report but was pleased to
hear that it concluded his office’s activities were neither illegal nor
unauthorized. He took strong issue, however, with the finding that some
activities had been “inappropriate.”

“The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations
that its pre-Iraq-war work was somehow ‘unlawful’ or ‘unauthorized’ and
that some information it gave to congressional committees was deceptive
or misleading,” said Feith, who left his Pentagon post in August 2005.

Feith called “bizarre” the inspector general’s conclusion that
some intelligence activities by the Office of Special Plans, which was
created while Feith served as the undersecretary of defense for policy
— the top policy position under then-Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld — were inappropriate but not unauthorized.