Probing memos and intelligence

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reports that the Feith memo that caused such a ruckus over the weekend is going to be investigated by the Justice Department. The CIA has made a mandatory request for a probe and it looks like the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence may throw its hat into the ring, too.

My guess is that they won't have to look much further than Feith to find the source of the leak. Doug's been on shaky ground for a few months, so he probably decided to go out with the guns blazin' before being formally released from his duties at the Pentagon.

As for whether the memo rings true, the Weekly Standard may think so, but it's pretty clear that it reflects the same "let's throw in everything that substantiates our claim no matter how tenuous or inaccurate it may be" technique that we saw deployed to shocking degrees in the run up to war, culminating in Colin Powell's disgraceful performance before the UN in February.

As the Post reports,

While Stephen F. Hayes, author of the Weekly Standard article, concluded that "there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans," some critics of the administration policy came to a different conclusion.

W. Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of the DIA, said yesterday that the Standard article "is a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?"

Another former senior intelligence official said the memo is not an intelligence product but rather "data points...among the millions of holdings of the intelligence agencies, many of which are simply not thought likely to be true."

And in related news, Sen. Jay Rockefeller explains why a thorough investigation of Iraq intelligence is needed and how Republicans are trying to block such an investigation.