Douglas Feith part 2

Is it any wonder that we went to war against Iraq. Doesn't the congress check out these guys before they get the jobs ? where was the media when all these guys wanted to go to war no one looked at their backround.
____________________________________

Called for Regime Change in Iraq Five Years Before 9/11 Attack
Douglas Feith, along with Richard Perle and other noted neo-cons, called for the removal of Saddam Hussein in a 1996 round table report A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. [3] The removal was considered a means for foiling Syria's regional ambitions.
This report was prepared more that five years before the attack on the World Trade Center. The report describes regime change in Iraq as an important Israeli strategic objective.
_______________________________________
Douglas Feith: Portrait of a Neoconservative by Tom Barry

Feith & Israel
Feith cannot be described by just one label. He is a longtime militarist, a neoconservative, and a right-wing Zionist. ..
His militarism – and close ties with the military-industrial complex – were evident in his policy work in the Pentagon working with Richard Perle in the 1980s and then part of the Vulcans along with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney in the Bush II administration; his work as a corporate lobbyist in the 1990s for Northrop Grumman along with other military contractors; and his prominent role in the Center for Security Policy (CSP) and in the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). His political orientation is distinctly neoconservative, as evident in his affiliations with such groups as the Middle East Forum, Center for Security Policy, and Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS).
Feith is a self-proclaimed Zionist – not a Labor Zionist, but a right-wing Zionist close to the Likud party and the Zionist Organization of America.
In the 1990s, Feith was an outspoken critic of the Middle East policies of both the Bush and Clinton administrations, which he said were based on the faulty "peace now" and "land for peace" policy frameworks. Instead, he called for a "peace through strength" agenda for Israel and the United States – invoking a phrase promoted by the neoconservatives since the mid-1970s, which became the slogan of the Center for Security Policy.
The Middle East Information Center described Feith as an "ideologue with an extreme anti-Arab bias," remarking that "during the Clinton years, Feith continued to oppose any agreement negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinians: Oslo, Hebron and Wye." Feith defined Oslo as "one-sided Israeli concessions, inflated Palestinian expectations, broken Palestinian solemn understandings, Palestinian violence, and American rewards for Palestinian recalcitrance."
In 1991, Feith, together with Frank Gaffney (founder of the Center for Security Policy), addressed the National Leadership Conference of the State of Israel Organization. In Feith's view, it was foolish for the U.S. government and Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians over issues of land given that contrasting principles – not differences over occupied lands – fueled the Israeli-Arab conflict.
In 1997 the Zionist Organization of America honored Dalck Feith and Douglas Feith at its annual dinner. It described the Feiths as "noted Jewish philanthropists and pro-Israel activists." The father was awarded the group's special Centennial Award "for his lifetime of service to Israel and the Jewish people," while Douglas received the "prestigious Louis D. Brandeis Award."
Dalck Feith was a militant in Betar, a Zionist youth movement founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Mussolini. Betar, whose members wore dark brown uniforms and spouted militaristic slogans modeled after other fascistic movements, was associated with the Revisionist Movement, which evolved in Poland to become the Herut Party, which later became the Likud Party.
In 1999 Douglas Feith wrote an essay for a book entitled The Dangers of a Palestinian State, which was published by ZOA. Also in 1999 Feith spoke to a 150-member ZOA lobbying mission to Congress that called, among other things, for "U.S. action against Palestinian Arab killers of Americans" and for moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The ZOA lobbying group also criticized the Clinton administration for its "refusal to criticize illegal Palestinian Arab construction in Jerusalem and the territories, which is far more extensive than Israeli construction there." . Noting the symbiosis of U.S. and Israeli interests, Feith wrote that Netanyahu knew that "if he encourages Israel's friends in Congress to support such programs, he will create much good will with the broad-based forces in the United States, led by the top Republicans in Congress, that deem missile defense the gravest U.S. military deficiency." Feith didn't see fit to mention that, along with Israel, the main beneficiary of such a global missile defense system would be military contractors such as the ones he represented in his law firm, including Northrop Grumman. .
Three of the six authors of the report – Perle (who was IASPS team leader), Wurmser, and Feith – helped set the Middle East strategy, including strong support for Sharon's hardline policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the Bush II administration. Perle chaired the DOD's Defense Policy Board, Feith became undersecretary of defense for policy, and Wurmser became Vice President Cheney's top Middle East adviser after leaving the State Department where he worked under Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton.
Other members of the IASPS study group on "A New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000" included James Colbert of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), and Jonathan Torop of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a neoconservative think tank founded by a director of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). At the time the report was published, David Wurmser was an associate of IASPS.
By 1997 Feith and other right-wing Zionists in the United States were expressing their disappointment that the Netanyahu government had not "dismantled the Oslo process," as Feith wrote in Commentary, the neoconservative magazine of the American Jewish Committee. Feith then proceeded to outline a radical break with what he characterized as the "peace now" framework of negotiations. It was not until a new Likud government was formed under Ariel Sharon and when Feith and other Zionists such as Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and Michael Rubin, together with militarists such as Rumsfeld and Cheney, took over control of Middle East policy during the Bush II administration that Israel, supported by the United States, made a "clean break" from the Oslo framework.
Typical of other neoconservatives, Feith in public statements has not made reference to his own Zionist convictions. Rather in congressional testimony and in op-eds in major media, Feith has instead argued that U.S. Policy in the Middle East should be guided by concerns about human rights and democracy. Israel, according to Feith, should never enter into good-faith negotiations with Arab countries or the PA because they are not democratic. Moreover, human rights violations in Syria, Iran, and Iraq justify aggressive U.S. and Israeli policies aimed at ousting undemocratic and repressive regimes. Israeli occupations are justified in the name of ensuring the national security of democratic Israel.
_______________________________________

Intelligence Operations and Scandals

Feith is no stranger to intelligence scandals. In 1982 he left the National Security Council under the shadow of an FBI investigation of administration officials suspected of passing intelligence information to Israel. During the Bush II administration, investigative reports by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker focused public attention on the Office of Special Plans that came under Feith's supervision.
In the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Feith and Wolfowitz started cooking intelligence to meet the needs of the radically new foreign and military policy that included regime change in Iraq as its top priority.
One might have thought that the priority for a special intelligence would have been to determine the whereabouts of the terrorist network that had just attacked the homeland. But Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Feith, working closely with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Richard Cheney, had other intelligence priorities. This loosely organized team soon became the Office of Special Plans directed by Abram Shulsky, formerly of RAND and the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC). The objective of this closet intelligence team, according to Rumsfeld, was to "search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists." OSP's mission was to create intelligence that the Pentagon and vice president could use to press their case for an Iraq invasion with the president and Congress.
About the same time the Pentagon took the first steps toward launching a counterintelligence operation called the Office of Strategic Intelligence to support the emerging security doctrine of preventive war. But this shadowy office, whose very purpose was to create propaganda and to counter information coming out of Iraq, was quickly disbanded. Congressional members expressed their concern that a counterintelligence office would not limit itself to discrediting the intelligence of U.S. adversaries. Such a secret counterintelligence office, critics warned, either intentionally or inadvertently might spread disinformation to the U.S. public and policy community as part of the buildup to the planned invasion.
Feith oversaw these efforts to provide the type of "strategic intelligence" needed to drive this policy agenda. As the Pentagon's top policy official in Middle East affairs, Feith had oversight authority of the DOD's Near East and South Asia bureau (NESA). That office came under the direct supervision of William Luti, a retired Navy officer who is a Newt Gingrich protégé and who has long advocated a U.S. military invasion of Iraq.
The OSP worked closely with Ahmed Chalabi and others from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an expatriate group promoted by the neoconservatives to replace the Hussein regime once U.S. troops were in Baghdad. Chalabi assured the Pentagon that a U.S. invasion would be supported by widespread Iraqi resistance, leading to claims by top administration officials and neocon pundits that the invasion would be a "cakewalk." The OSP also relied on intelligence flows about Iraq from a rump unit established in the offices of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – who like Chalabi was a proponent of a U.S. military invasion and had close relations with neocons like Wolfowitz and Feith.
Feith became embroiled in a new intelligence scandal in late August 2004 when it was reported that the FBI had for the past two years been investigating intelligence leaks to Israel from the Pentagon. The Pentagon official named in the media reports is Lawrence Franklin, who was brought into the Office of Special Plans from the Defense Intelligence Agency. Franklin, who had served in the military attaché's office in the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv in the late 1990s as a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, is suspected of passing classified information about Iran to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and Israel. Fellow neocon and Franklin's friend Michael Ledeen called the allegations against Franklin "nonsensical." The FBI is also investigating whether Franklin and other DOD officials passed classified information to Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. According to one neocon interviewed by the Washington Post, "This is part of a civil war with the administration, a basic dislike between the old CIA and the neoconservatives."
_______________________________________