've been told off the record that some of this intelligence is very iffy. So let's discover which bits are iffier than others. Isn't that what the press is supposed to be about? On an issue that's obviously extremely important?

Except for a few, inconclusive exceptions, the memo doesn\ufffdt actually contain much \ufffdnew\ufffd intelligence at all. Instead, it mostly recycles shards of old, raw data that were first assembled last year by a tiny team of floating Pentagon analysts (led by a Pennsylvania State University professor and U.S. Navy analyst Christopher Carney) whom Feith asked to find evidence of an Iraqi-Al Qaeda \ufffdconnection\ufffd in order to better justify a U.S. invasion.

Within the U.S. intelligence establishment, the predominant view\ufffdthen as now\ufffdis that the Feith-Carney case was murky at best. Culling through intelligence files, the Feith team indeed found multiple \ufffdreports\ufffd of alleged meetings between Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda operatives dating back to the early 1990s when Osama first set up shop in Sudan. But many of these reports were old, uncorroborated and came from sources of unknown if not dubious credibility, U.S. intelligence officials say. (Not unlike, as it has turned out, much of the \ufffdreporting\ufffd on Iraq\ufffds ever-elusive weapons of mass destruction.) Moreover, other reports\ufffdsome of which came foreign intelligence services and Iraqi defectors\ufffdwere selectively presented by the Feith team and are, as one U.S. official told NEWSWEEK, \ufffdcontradicted by other things.\ufffd