Pentagon challengesRockefeller on Feith hit

The Pentagon is accusing Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of distorting the intelligence work of its No. 3 civilian official, and calling on the Democrat to prove his charges or retract them.

It is unusual for the Pentagon to formally take on a sitting senator. In this case, the challenge came in a letter to Mr. Rockefeller on Friday from Powell A. Moore, the assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs.

“On behalf of the department, I request that, if you have any evidence supporting the serious charge you floated during your press conference, you provide it to the department,” Mr. Moore wrote to Mr. Rockefeller of West Virginia, ranking Democrat on the Senate SelectCommittee on Intelligence,who has emerged as one of the Senate’s fiercest critics of President Bush.

“If there is not evidence, then a retraction and apology would be appropriate,” said the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

Last year, Mr. Rockefeller was embarrassed when one of his staff’s strategy papers leaked to the press. The paper talked of how Democrats would work with Republicans to get a critical report on the Bush administration and pre-Iraq war intelligence, then continue to exploit the issue no matter what the report’s conclusions.

Mr. Rockefeller criticized the Pentagon official on Friday, the same day the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the report on prewar intelligence findings on Iraq to which the leaked memo referred.

The unanimous committee report made a brief mention of the intelligence work of the No. 3 official, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy. But the report did not criticize Mr. Feith or accuse him of wrongdoing. The bipartisan report, which Mr. Rockefeller approved, said there was no evidence that any policy-maker had pressured CIA analysts to conform intelligence findings to the Pentagon’s point of view.

At his post-report press conference, Mr. Rockefeller charged the opposite.

“We’ve done a little bit of work on the Number-three guy in the Defense Department, Douglas Feith, part of his alleged efforts to run intelligence past the intelligence community altogether … and was he running private intelligence failure, which is not lawful?” Mr. Rockefeller said Friday at the joint press conference with committee Chairman Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican.

“The committee’s report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments,” Mr. Rockefeller said.

At issue is a special team Mr. Feith set up after the September 11 attacks to examine any linkage between Saddam Hussein’s regime and international terrorists, including Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. Mr. Feith’s personnel examined years of intelligence reports on Iraq-al Qaeda contacts, put them into a briefing and delivered it to the CIA, which was compiling a report in 2002 called “Iraqi Support for Terrorism.”

Defense officials, who asked not to be named, said yesterday that Mr. Rockefeller’s charges against Mr. Feith are not supported by his own bipartisan report.

On this point, the Senate committee report said, “All of the participants in the August 2002 coordination meeting on the September 2002 version of Iraqi Support for Terrorism interviewed by the committee agreed that while some changes were made to the paper as a result of the participation of two office of the under secretary of defense for policy staffers, their presence did not result in changes to their analytical judgments.”

In another section on this same issue, the Senate report says, “A number of the individuals interviewed by the committee in conducting its review stated that administration officials questioned analysts repeatedly on the potential for cooperation between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda. Though these allegations appeared repeatedly in the press and in other public reporting on the lead-up to the war, no analyst questioned by the committee stated that the questions were unreasonable, or that they were encouraged by the questioning to alter their conclusions regarding Iraq’s links to al Qaeda.”

The Pentagon’s letter of complaint from Mr. Moore to Mr. Rockefeller said, “The department is surprised and disturbed by the assertion during your press conference [Friday] that Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith might be ‘running a private intelligence failure (sic), which is not lawful.’ ”

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