WASHINGTON - The Pentagon's inspector general said Friday it has begun an investigation into allegations that an office run by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's former policy chief, Douglas J. Feith, engaged in illegal or inappropriate intelligence activities before the Iraq war. ADVERTISEMENT

The probe, which two senators requested two months ago, comes at a contentious point in the political debate over President Bush's decision to invade Iraq and the intelligence upon which Bush based his decision.

It extends a controversy that has prominently featured Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., a vocal critic of Bush's Iraq policy, who has accused Feith of engaging in inappropriate intelligence activities at the Pentagon and of deceiving Congress about intelligence on Iraq's prewar links to the al-Qaida terrorist network.

Levin told reporters Friday that Feith provided the White House and its National Security Council with "really erroneous and distorted intelligence" about Iraq and its purported links to terrorist groups.

One of the questions to be probed by the Pentagon inspector general, Levin said, is whether Feith, in his position as under secretary of defense for policy, "provided a separate channel of intelligence, unbeknownst to the CIA, to the White House — which he did."

In a letter Wednesday to Feith's successor, Eric Edelman, and to Rumsfeld's intelligence chief, Stephen Cambone, the inspector general's office asked for points of contact for the investigation no later than Dec. 1.

"The overall objective will be to determine whether personnel assigned to the Office of Special Plans from September 2002 through June 2003 conducted unauthorized, unlawful or inappropriate intelligence activities," the letter said. A copy was released by the Pentagon late Friday afternoon.

Feith left his Pentagon post this summer.

In a telephone interview Friday evening, Feith said the allegations were groundless.

"These matters have been carefully reviewed already," he said, referring to a bipartisan congressional inquiry in 2004. "They concluded that my office worked properly and that it in fact improved the intelligence product by asking good questions. I'm confident the Defense Department inspector general will come to the same conclusion."

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said the small office that Feith set up prior to the start of the Iraq war to evaluate intelligence on Iraq — the Office of Special Plans — has been the central focus of numerous inquiries by members of Congress and others who question whether it performed improper intelligence functions.

"The Office of Special Plans has been the subject of a high degree of scrutiny over the last several months, and one in which every inquiry into it has yielded no findings of improper or unlawful activity," Whitman said.

The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts of Kansas, asked the Pentagon inspector general in early September to investigate what Roberts called "persistent and, to date, unsubstantiated allegations that there was something unlawful or improper about the activities" of Feith's office.

Roberts wrote in a Sept. 9 letter to the inspector general that Feith had testified before both the Armed Services and Intelligence committees of the Senate, and "I have not discovered any credible evidence of unlawful or improper activity, yet the allegations persist."

Levin, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, followed with his own letter to the inspector general Sept. 22 in which he requested a broad probe of Feith's office. Among the questions he asked be investigated was whether the office produced its own intelligence analysis of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida and presented that to the staffs of the National Security Council and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Levin and others have asserted that Feith and other officials exaggerated the available intelligence on links between Iraq and al-Qaida in order to bolster the administration's case for removing then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The White House denies that intelligence was misused or manipulated in the run-up to the war.

Pentagon officials pointed out the presidential commission that assessed U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, known as the WMD Commission, concluded in its report of March 31 that intelligence agencies did not make or change any judgments about Iraq's weapons capabilities in response to political pressure.

Commentary:
The Pentagon has been very good at covering up and lying lately so I'm not sure what value this story has. Recall how the military said they didn't use napalm in Iraq but in fact they did. Then recall how they said they didn't use phosphorous bombs in Fallujah, but within days that lie was exposed too and the military was forced to admit it used these weapons and admit it lied about it.. The concept of "honor" in Bush's military is gone.