The Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes wrote a book: Cheney: The Untold Story of the Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President in American History. It is one of those ‘authorized’ biographies. Some call them ‘hagiographies’ or ‘lives of the saints’. It’s not surprising that Hayes got this job. He was probably the single worst journalist in the country during the criticial 2002-2004 period when we were ramping up for war and then seeking to justify what we had done. For example, in January 2004, Dick Cheney recommended this Hayes article as the best source on the links between Saddam Hussein and Usama bin-Laden. The article was based on a memo by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, created for the Senate Intelligence Committee (then run by Pat Roberts of Kansas) and then leaked to Hayes.
All the way back in 2005, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) succeeded in getting partial declassification of a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report from February 2002 that said the primary source for Feith’s most alarming allegations was probably lying.
“This is the first report from Ibn al-Shaykh in which he claims Iraq assisted al-Qaida’s CBRN [Chemical, Biological, Radiological or Nuclear] efforts. However, he lacks specific details on the Iraqis involved, the CBRN materials associated with the assistance, and the location where training occurred. It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers (emphasis added). Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.”
When Levin took over as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2007, he quickly won further declassification of this report.
The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community’s prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.
The report’s release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq “before we ever launched” the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.
“This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq,” Cheney told Limbaugh’s listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had “led the charge for Iraq.” Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would “play right into the hands of al-Qaeda.”
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who requested the report’s declassification, said in a written statement that the complete text demonstrates more fully why the inspector general concluded that a key Pentagon office — run by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith — had inappropriately written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence consensus disputed.
The ‘Ibn al-Shaykh’ referenced above is better known as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi. His real name is Ali Mohamed Abdelaziz al Fakhiri and he is dead. He died of an apparent suicide in a Libyan prison. His last reported words were to Human Rights Watch researcher Heba Morayef, who visited him in April.
She said Fakhiri appeared for just two minutes in a prison courtyard. He look[ed] well, but was unwilling to speak to the Rights Watch team, she said. “Where were you when I was being tortured in American prisons?” she quoted him as saying.
You can read about his time in American custody here. It is not happy reading.
If you want comedy, you can read this December 2002 piece by Stephen Hayes where he makes fun of Tom Daschle for suggesting that Saddam Hussein might have unilaterally disarmed. That is, in fact, what Saddam did. As for the now deceased al-Libi, the false information he provided under torture was used by Colin Powell in front of the United Nations. I think that was the plan all along.
