Douglas J. Feith’s successor as undersecretary of defense for policy, Eric Edelman, has put together a 53-page rebuttal of the Pentagon Inspector General’s report criticizing the Office of Special Plans (caution: PDF; hat tip to McClatchy ace reporter Jonathan Landay). Its key point: what the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (OUSDP) did wasn’t intelligence work at all, but rather policy work. It’s an argument apparently generated to spare the OUSDP from the charge of illegality, which the IG doesn’t in fact put on the office — but, in his statement yesterday, Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV), the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, raised as a remaining possibility.Now, there’s a difference between the OSP and its precursor, the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, but Edelman’s rebuttal often conflates it, to refer in total to the OUSDP. And what’s striking about Edelman’s contention is that the substance of the OUSDP’s work is not in fact in question. As his rebuttal states plainly, the office was designed to critique intelligence on the question of state sponsors of terrorism, and particularly Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda. A variation on this sentence appears several times in Edelman’s report: “The result was a draft briefing on how these contacts might be viewed if one did not assume a priori that secular Baathists and Islamists would never cooperate.” Indeed, in a June 4, 2003 Pentagon briefing, Feith described the PCTEG as something rather similar:
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=181522