Our Standards Are Weak

This Washington Post article indicates that the Feith memo leaked to the Weakest Link, I mean Weakly Standard, is under investigation by the Justice Department. So this Administration has given up on Osama bin Laden, leaked the name of a national intelligence officer working on WMD, and leaked national intelligence about investigation of terrorist activity. Quite a record of integrity there...


The CIA will ask the Justice Department to investigate the leak of a 16-page classified Pentagon memo that listed and briefly described raw agency intelligence on any relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, according to congressional and administration sources.
[...]
A senior intelligence official said yesterday that the NSA and the DIA may make their own referrals to Justice, based on their analysis of the information disclosed from the Feith memo.
[...]
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."