Hayes revisited

Slate—of all places—has two pieces today relevant to the Stephen Hayes article on possible Iraq-al Qaeda links that I referenced here. First is a Jack Shafer analysis of the press coverage (or rather the relative lack thereof):

Many a reporter has hitched a ride onto Page One with the leak of intelligence much rawer than the stuff in Feith's memo. You can bet the farm that if a mainstream publication had gotten the Feith memo first, it would have used it immediately—perhaps as a hook to re-examine the ongoing war between the Pentagon and CIA about how to interpret intelligence. Likewise, you'd be wise to bet your wife's farm that had a similar memo arguing no Saddam-Osama connection been leaked to the press, it would have generated 100 times the news interest as the Hayes story.

As Shafer points out, there have been a couple of articles critical of Hayes, first in Tuesday's WaPo, and now in Newsweek. But overall the coverage has been decidedly, well, understated. Meanwhile, Hayes is defending his first article at some length. He sums up thusly:

James Woolsey, CIA director under President Bill Clinton, made reference to the Tenet letter in an appearance this past weekend on “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.” Tenet's enumeration of the links and the evidence in the Feith memo has Woolsey convinced.

“Anybody who says there is no working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence going back to the early '90s—they can only say that if they're illiterate. This is a slam dunk.”

The second article in Slate revisits the question of purported al Qaeda-Iraqi intelligence connections in Prague during 2001. Case not closed, indeed. (Some links via Instapundit and Drudge.)