I posted pretty exhaustively earlier on that DIA report that claimed there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, only to lay out 3-5 clear connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda running all the way to al-Qaeda’s number two. In that post I made mention of how the report got spun and leaked:

The problem with the bureaucracy of the federal government is the higher up you go the more you find people playing president. Their tenure has gone to their head as the skills have atrophied. Clearly whoever wrote the executive summary and picked the phrase “no smoking gun” had a presonal agenda. No one but someone trying to cover up the detailed findings would say a long term relationship between Zawahiri’s organization and Saddam’s regime would result in ‘no connection’ between al Qaeda and Iraq …

Seems I am not the only one familiar with the federal government and how bureaucrats love to get in the news and play president. Richard Miniter has found some more background on the report and its failings:

One official familiar with the history of the report told me what he believed happened. Kevin M. Woods, the main author of the report, wrote a factual report whose conclusions clung narrowly to the available facts. Somewhere along the line, a politically motivated supervisor inserted a one-liner into the executive summary, and that person, or another, leaked it to Strobel, at McClatchy Newspapers. The rest of the MSM dutifully followed Strobel’s line. That made a mostly neutral report into a politically-charged weapon, much like the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE).

Records will show who this person was – and I expect his 15 minutes of fame is about ready to hit. And I would also suspect this person is clueless to what he is about to get into (most wannabes in the DC area are like that, wild-eyed and naive about how the big boys play politics). But beside the fact we have now narrowed down the leaker to the last one to make significant edits (and sign off on the document) there is more, like actual Iraqi orders to meet with al-Qaeda which are not in the assessment:

On Friday, I spoke with a former government official whose position required him to review captured Iraqi documents in the Harmony database. (He insisted on anonymity because his work was classified and he continues to consult on intelligence matters.) “I have been in that database and I saw an instruction from the [Iraqi] foreign ministry to its embassy in Havana, instructing them to cooperate with members of Al-Qaeda. The document named specific individuals we know are connected to Al-Qaeda.” Yet, that document does not appear in this report. Why? Most likely, my source says, because it is still being used by the State department or the CIA.

And this report is not exhaustive by any means:

There are two problems with that claim. The Harmony database contains some two million documents. So the report examined less than a quarter of the captured Iraqi documents — hardly exhaustive. In the fine print, the report concedes it was not able to access many documents because they were being actively used by “other agencies” — meaning one or more of the nation’s 16 intelligence services, the State department, or other elements of the Defense department.

The second problem: The researchers didn’t even examine all 600,000 documents available to them, the report concedes. Only 15% — about 90,000 — of those 600,000 documents have been translated into English. The remaining 510,000 documents were, in the language of the report, “screened” not read.

The SurrenderMedia charged Bush with fabricating and twisting intelligence – but it seems we have caught them red handed fabricating and twisting intelligence with the help of someone on the inside of government. This is not the first time we have seen this deliberate erroneous reporting (the FISA story claimed Bush was not using FISA, when the facts ended up being the opposite where NSA leads were being used as evidence in probable cause for the first time in 2 decades or longer). But this is clearly a case where a lie was planted in the executive summary (“no smoking gun”) deliberately and then leaked to the media and used to misrepresent the story to the American people.

And they are the ones who will judge these juvenile actions. People who have to lie and cover up contrary evidence to make a point are the worst kinds of losers. The fact is Saddam had connections to AQ. We have no evidence they coordinated the 9-11 attacks. We have plenty of evidence they were well situated to plan and execute a lot of future 9-11 attacks, and we have no evidence any serious barrier was in their way if they wished to do so. And that is what we call a ‘serious threat’. Americans know this and have not needed evidence in a court of law to realize the nexus of death that was sitting out there in the sands of Iraq.

The media thinks they create reality because they control the information flow. Well they don’t control reality (as our success in Iraq shows) and they don’t control the information flow (as the blogosphere demonstrates). And if they insist on destroying the credibility (and whatever market value they have) then fine, knock yourselves out (pun intended). Lying to America is the fastest way to become ignored and irrelevant. McClatchy must have squirreled away a lot of profits if they ran with this BS – because they won’t be around much longer if all they are is a clearing house for propaganda and lies. No one pays good money for that!

Addendum: This also smells of a repeat (though slight variant) on the Joe Wilson gambit. Remember Joe Wilson started the “Bush Lied” garbage when Wilson lied about forged documents on Iraq and WMDs being used by the President knowingly to fool America into war in Iraq. Wilson was the one caught lying about documents under his wife’s control at the CIA which, sadly for the Wilson lies, could not have been in US hands when Wilson claimed they were.

An often ignored aspect of the the Plame Game was that Wilson was working, with other veterans from the intelligence community, on Kerry’s campaign at the time. This is a classic DC interview for political slots – show us what you can do with the media. It is a test run. I would not be surprised at all if this DIA person who twisted the summary and leaked to the press was also angling for a job under Clinton or Obama. What would be REALLY clumsy is if the person in question is already on one of these campaigns. My guess it would be the Clinton side -who can only deflect the damage they are doing to Obama by sowing some damage onto Bush and McCain. You have to know DC to appreciate that this bastardized DIA report could be another attempt at updated version of the Plame Game.