Yesterday Stephen Hayes responded to Newsweek’s dismissive critique of Hayes’ Case Closed article. As I posted here, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball write that the evidence revealed in the Feith memo was nothing more than “unverified claims that were first advanced by some top Bush administration officials more than a year ago—and were largely discounted at the time by the U.S. intelligence community.”
In his response, Hayes explains that Isikoff And Hosenball incorrectly assert that the Feith memo “omits any reference to the interrogations of a host of other high-level al Qaeda and Iraqi detainees.” Hayes explains that paragraph No. 34 of the Feith memo concerns a September 3, 2002 interview, of senior al Qaeda lieutenant Zubaida. He next points out that paragraph No. 39 concerns a May 2003 custodial interview with Faruq Hijazi,
Hayes refutes the assertion that the memo concedes that much of the more recent reporting about Iraqi-al Qaeda ties is 'conflicting. He points out that the “conflicting” characterization was Hayes,’ not the memo’s.
There is more, Hayes also writes that the Feith memo “contains 13 reports of collaboration after July 1999. Several of these appear to be well-sourced and corroborated.”
Overall Hayes successfully makes it appear that “Isikoff and Hosenball have not seen the memo or they misreport its contents.”
Where is the mainstream media? Other than the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek the Feith memo has been ignored by the mainstream media. Apparantly, the media views this as does Joshua Marshall. In his weekly column in The Hill, Marshall characterizes it as "the dubious link between Iraq and al Qaeda." Marshall, like Newsweek, the Washington Post and the New York Times writes that the Feith memo is nothing but discredited old news.
In talkingpointsmemo.com, Marshall is more succinct writing, "the people who are following the intel story know that this is raw intelligence which the people in a position to know, and with access to all the information, say is either unreliable or doesn’t amount to anything."
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