The conclusion of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s ‘Iraqi intelligence cell’ during a September 16, 2002, briefing for vice presidential Chief of Staff Scooter Libby and Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley at the White House was presented in a slide show. “The Feith analysts were essentially claiming that because al-Qaeda and Iraq had joined together in a clandestine partnership to attack the United States, there would be little, if any, evidence to prove the conspiracy. ‘When operational security is very good,’ the opening slide in the Feith team’s briefing read, ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ That certainly was a contention that could not be disproved.”
– Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris, Pages 106-107