Prior story inoperative. Abort! Abort! In which we discover that working the intel beat means never having to say you're sorry:

A bit over a week ago I tried to unpuzzle myself about the Times' effort to flog the story of a seized letter, purportedly by an Al Qaeda associate, attempting to enlist Al Qaeda in fomenting Shia-against-Sunni violence in Iraq prior to the scheduled sovereignty handoff. Billmon had serious doubts about the document's authenticity tout court, while Juan Cole offered some reasons why the attribution of the letter to the notorious Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might be dubious. (Cole has since concluded that the letter is authentic and the attribution correct. His latter post links, by the way, to a very good piece by Time magazine's Tony Karon that clarifies Zarqawi's status while addressing what I was mainly concerned about in my earlier post, the agenda behind the effort to hype the captured letter.)

Well, Douglas Jehl informs us on A1 today that the story, whatever it was, is now officially, er, sort of revoked:

The most active terrorist network inside Iraq appears to be operating mostly apart from Al Qaeda, senior American officials say.

Most significantly, the officials said, American intelligence had picked up signs that Qaeda members outside Iraq had refused a request from the group, Ansar al-Islam, for help in attacking Shiite Muslims in Iraq. The request was made by Ansar's leader, a Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and intercepted by the United States last month. The apparent refusal is being described by some American intelligence analysts as an indication of a significant divide between the groups.

A bit odd, isn't it, to read of Al Qaeda rebuffing a request that was intercepted and never sent? That's by no means the only sloppiness in Jehl's reporting: he treats the Zarqawi attribution as simple fact, rather than as an intelligence conclusion, and he likewise accepts as fact that Zarqawi is the leader of Ansar al-Islam, a point of Bush Administration propaganda (Colin Powell insisted on it in his Security Council presentation) that is currently in some dispute. Sloppier still, Jehl confuses the issue by letting the "significant divide" of the graf above slide into "divergence" in this passage just a couple of grafs later:

In an interview today, one official cautioned that it would be a mistake to see the two groups as having diverged, and that it was too soon to say whether Al Qaeda might support Mr. Zarqawi. This official described the fact that Mr. Zarqawi had appealed for help as a sign of "emerging links" between the two groups. "Maybe someone did say no, but that doesn't mean they'll say no tomorrow," the official said.

Jehl allows this flat-out spin ("It could too still happen!") more leeway than it deserves. The two groups can hardly be said to have "diverged" when the Zarqawi letter strongly implies (as pretty much everybody except William Safire accepts) that they were never together to begin with.

The real meat of the story, and what looks to be its real occasion, doesn't appear until the middle grafs:

But, officials said, there are growing indications that the two groups are distinct and independent, and are embracing different tactics and agendas. A recent report by the State Department's intelligence branch emphasizes those differences, according to American officials who have read the classified document. "Even among Sunni Muslim extremists and committed terrorists, including Zarqawi and Al Qaeda, there can be extreme discrepancies about strategy and tactics," one senior official said. "This is not a world of homogeneous bad guys."

I'd have missed what the graf really meant if Kevin Drum hadn't fortuitously posted an excerpt just this morning from an L.A. Times piece on the State Department intelligence bureau. These are the guys that the PNAC crowd didn't, and don't, want to listen to on the subject of Iraq: they were skeptical on WMD before the war, and State has a bad reputation among the fire-eaters as being soft on Islamofascism.

It seems clear enough what's happened: somebody in the State intel operation, somebody in a position to know, got hold of Jehl and clued him in that the Times had been played on the Zarqawi letter, and indeed that the intelligence community as a whole wanted to dissassociate itself from last week's hype. (When Jehl tells me that "officials declined ... to say how American intelligence agencies had learned" of Al Qaeda's rebuff to Zarqawi, I have to think that it's fig-leaf time. The best defense is a good offense, after all, and if you're going to climb down from something, you want to do it by claiming it's on the basis of unspecified new information.) Of course, Jehl's not going to come out and say that his paper got played, but his noting State as a source here is as close to an "oops" as we can expect to get.

And poor old Bill "Smoking Gun" Safire? I'd feel embarrassed for him if he weren't an Old Nixonian^TM, and thus professionally as well as morally incapable of embarrassment.

posted by michael  2:37:52 PM  
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