U.S. can't discount Osama, Saddam link

Reports of events in Iraq and U.S. policy there have long been skewed by an oppositional media establishment. A new example makes the point very well.

Prestige outlets in Washington - the big newspapers, the newsmagazines and the broadcast networks - have been molasses-slow getting to an astonishing story in the Nov. 24 issue of The Weekly Standard, a conservative publication. The issue was mailed on Monday, Nov. 17, and was available on the Internet a couple of days earlier. Nonprestige outlets, including Internet "blogs" (personal Web pages) and conservative publications, were the only ones to notice at first.

The Standard was given a copy of a classified letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee from Douglas J. Feith, an undersecretary of defense, supplementing his testimony that he had found many indications of cooperation between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein - a possibility the anti-war crowd has sneered at.

The committee had asked Feith to supply texts to support his oral, secret testimony that many such reports had not been reflected in finished analysis.

The request was routine. The response was anything but.

Feith provided 50 passages, some going back to the early 1990s, from various documents that detailed links between al-Qaeda and Baghdad.

Officials have pooh-poohed the letter on the grounds that the 50 items were "raw" intelligence, some of them wrong, and all fully taken into account in more finished reports of an official conclusion that such a link was "ambiguous" - a point disputed by Feith.

"Ambiguous" is a word that can cover all the ground from "almost certainly not true" to "we think it's true but don't want to say why."

The importance of the letter is not particular reports but the sheer scope of the evidence. It would fully entitle any president to treat the possibility of a connection with the utmost gravity, and certainly raises questions about the quality of intelligence analysis.

The public ought to know that this evidence is there. Yet the Washington Post ran a very brief, dismissive story Nov. 15, a Saturday, when attention is skimpy. Perhaps under pressure from continued coverage by the "blogs," The New York Times, cue sheet for the establishment, got around to the story on Thursday, Nov. 20 - at the bottom of Page 14, the third of three pages of Iraq news. And the same day the Post used the letter as an opening into reports of disagreements between the Defense Department and the CIA - on Page 34.

This amounts to hiding the news.

The people who sneer at the possibility of bin Laden-Saddam connections overlap with people who tend to blame Sept. 11 on the failure of the United States to solve all the problems of the Middle East. The recent bloody attacks in Turkey show that it's the modern world itself that the terrorists are trying to destroy. Turning a blind eye to evidence that conflicts with cherished feel-good assumptions is a dangerous habit.

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