Douglas Feith

If you read PNACs letter to Bill Clinton in yesterdays post urging him to invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussian, you saw that the signatories read like a whose who of the original Bush Administration. Thier agenda was obvious right from the start, and Paul O"neill the treasury secretary was corrrect when he said it was Iraq from the first meeting of Bush's cabinet.
Where was the media at that time?No investigation of these guys as for the congress owned by the republicans. Here we have a bunch of people who from at least 1990 were determined to invade Iraq and possible other countries who obtain positions of power in our government and nobody takes notice.The day after 9/11 Rumsfeld says lets bomb Iraq they have good targets Afghanistan doesn't. It was in the early days after 9/11 that the decision was made to invade Iraq and orders were given to find a way to lay the blame for it on Saddam, by any means necessary. So Feith was given the job to falsify evidence, to make up evidence and to ignore real evidence. All those neocons in that administration after having wrecked a country caused the killing of thousands, alienated the United States from the rest of the world, added four billion to the national debt( war costs will probably exceed one trillion) will not be punished. Indeed Paul Wolfowitz is now head of the world bank and Feith has a book contract and a position at Georgetown University. They just walk away from all the havoc they caused. It just doesn't seem right. As for Bush himself well he will have a 500 million dollar library and a place in history as the worst president in the history of the country.
Today and tomorrow I will present information about one of the culprits who should really be considered a war criminal.
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Douglas Feith: Portrait of a Neoconservative by Tom Barry

Feith serves as the number three civilian in the George W. Bush administration's Defense Department, under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Undersecretary for Policy Feith previously served in the Reagan administration, starting off as Middle East specialist at the National Security Council (1981-82) and then transferring to the Defense Department where he spent two years as staff lawyer for Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle. In 1984 Feith advanced to become Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy. Feith and Perle were among the leading advocates of a policy to build closer U.S. military and diplomatic ties with Turkey and to increase the military ties between Turkey and Israel.
Feith left DOD in mid-1986 to found the Feith & Zell law firm, based initially in Israel, whose clients included major military contractor Northrop Grumman. In 1989 Feith established another company, International Advisors Inc., which provided lobbying services to foreign clients including Turkey.
Feith's private business dealings raised eyebrows in Washington. In 1999, his firm Feith & Zell formed an alliance with the Israel-based Zell, Goldberg & Co., which resulted in the creation of the Fandz International Law Group. According to Fandz's web site, the law group "has recently established a task force dealing with issues and opportunities relating to the recently ended war with Iraq, and is assisting regional construction and logistics firms to collaborate with contractors from the United States and other coalition countries in implementing infrastructure and other reconstruction projects in Iraq." Remarked Washington Post columnist Al Kamen, "Interested parties can reach [Fandz] through its Web site, at www.fandz.com. Fandz.com? Hmmm. Rings a bell. Oh, yes, that was the Web site of the Washington law firm of Feith & Zell, P.C., as in Douglas Feith [the] undersecretary of defense for policy and head of – what else? – reconstruction matters in Iraq. It would be impossible indeed to overestimate how perfect ZGC would be in 'assisting American companies in their relations with the United States government in connection with Iraqi reconstruction projects.'"
A vocal advocate of U.S. intervention in the Middle East and for the hardline policies of the Likud party in Israel, Feith has been involved in or overseen the activities of two controversial Pentagon operations – the Defense Policy Board, whose former head Richard Perle resigned after concerns arose about conflicts of interest between his board duties and business dealings, and the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which allegedly misrepresented intelligence on Iraq to support administration policies. Feith's office not only housed the Office of Special Plans and other special intelligence operations associated with the Near East and South Asia (NESA) office and the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs but also the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, who directed military policy on interrogations of the Guantanamo Bay detainees and then arranged for the transfer of the base's commanding officer, Maj. General Geoffrey Miller, to the Abu Ghraib prison in an effort to extract more information from Iraqi prisoners.
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The New York Times alleged that Chalabi had given Iran sensitive intelligence information. The Times claimed Chalabi told the Iranians that the US had broken the Iran intelligence service's communications code. Iraqi police and American soldiers raided Chalabi's home and offices in Baghdad, accusing him of embezzlement and theft.
The man whose speeches Feith admired and once dubbed "quite moving" was turning out to be the greatest con in a cohort of cons involved in selling the war. And Feith had bought everything Chalabi was peddling.
The search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction ended in late 2004, with a report issued shortly after Bush's re-election.

No stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons were found. No active nuclear-weapons program existed. However, none of these facts led to Feith's resignation in January 2005.
Undoubtedly, Feith would have remained in his position as long as he wished to stay, facing as few consequences for his mistakes as his elected supervisor, if not for explosive accusations that Feith was using his Pentagon office to help the Israeli government directly.

In August 2004, CBS News reported that an analyst "with ties to top Pentagon officials Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz" had been working in a Pentagon office developing Iraq policy. That analyst was alleged to have passed on classified documents to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which in turn sent the information to the Israeli embassy in Washington. The FBI and the Senate Intelligence Committee launched investigations into Feith's involvement.
News of the investigation fueled long-standing accusations that PNAC members, most of whom now occupied the highest levels of government under President Bush, were more interested in supporting Israel than the United States. The administration's defenders had long charged that tying everything back to PNAC smacked of anti-Semitism and harkened back to allegations of "Jewish conspiracies."

However, nearly all criticism of PNAC and its influence in government was based not on bigotry but on the evidence that most of its signatories did indeed hold high positions in the administration, that they had been successful in influencing the course of United States policy, and that US security and standing in the world suffered for the realization of PNAC's principle
It is important to note that what is objectionable about Feith is a) his playing fast and loose with the truth, producing poor intelligence analysis that has been shown to be completely false and b) his doing so on behalf of not only American nationalist aspirations but also on behalf of a non-American political party, the Likud coalition of Israel, which desired to destroy the Oslo peace process initiated by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ... There is no objection to Americans having multiple identities or love for more than one country. Someone of Serbian heritage would make a perfectly good Pentagon administrator. But you wouldn't want a vehement supporter of Slobodan Milosevic as the number three man in the Pentagon. It is ideological double loyalty that is dangerous.
That danger did not end with Feith's departure. Feith's policies and politics live on in rhetoric about the regional and international "threats" posed by Iran and Syria. The Bush administration alleges that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program, and calls for US action are heard in conservative media outlets that often test administration talking points.
UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, a vocal critic of the Iraq War, told a crowd during a speech in Olympia, Washington, in February 2005 that Bush planned air strikes to destroy alleged nuclear development sites in Iran, and that Syria had been mentioned as a possible target of the US as well.
Bush himself minimized the possibility of military action on Iran, but his rhetoric on the topic of Iran's weapons during interviews February 22, 2005, struck a markedly familiar tone: "The Iranians don't need any excuses," he told the White House press. "They just need to do what the free world has asked them to do. And it's pretty clear: Give up your weapons program."

The final government report examining pre-war intelligence on Iraq, released in late March 2005, was not kind to the assertions Feith and others had made in the run-up to war. Its official conclusion, that no administration officials pressured intelligence officers to invent or distort information, masked the revelation that, according to the UK Observer, "An alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi has emerged as the key source in the US rationale for going to war in Iraq. According to a US presidential commission looking into pre-war intelligence failures, the basis for pivotal intelligence on Iraq's alleged biological weapons programmes and fleet of mobile labs was a spy described as 'crazy' by his intelligence handlers and a 'congenital liar' by his friends. The defector, given the code name Curveball by the CIA, has emerged as the central figure in the corruption of US intelligence estimates on Iraq.

Feith, once a rising star in the conservative Bush White House and the lucrative right-wing speaking circuit, now is reviled even by those audiences which he might reasonably expect to be friendly. During a March 2005 speech to Harvard University students, one stood and shouted at him, "Fifteen hundred dead because of what you did!" according to the Harvard Crimson.
But Feith did not by himself create the situation in which we now find ourselves. Feith was not empowered by Congress to declare war, nor did he issue the orders to do so. Feith was a symptom, and the freedom he was given to pass on incorrect information and rely on rosy-hued best-case scenarios for a war in the oldest civilization on Earth speaks volumes about what exactly was the larger disease.
Slate columnist Chris Suellentrop called Feith "a leading indicator, like a falling Dow - something that correlates with but does not cause disaster." His reappearances in the spring of 2005 seemed to lend truth to Cole's January 2005 prediction that Feith now will be seen "forever on cable news channels as one of those dreary neocon talking heads flogged by the American Enterprise Institute, a far rightwing 'think tank' funded by cranky rich people to obscure the truth. Another [potential downside to Feith's resignation] is that his departure now may help keep Bush from being blamed for his shady dealings in intelligence 'analysis.'"

When George W. Bush was elected president in 2000, those who were skeptical of his intelligence and intellectual curiosity pointed to the advisers with whom he would surely surround himself and said these people, experienced in foreign policy under his father as well as other previous presidents, would keep him from venturing too far off America's beaten track.
Few considered what might happen if those advisers were simply incorrect, blinded by ambition or, in the worst possible scenario, acting in service to a cause that trumped their ability to recognize fundamental facts about the region in which they were advocating America begin meddling. Fundamental facts which many people, including officials of the United Nations and the US State Department, attempted to point out, to no avail.

Few took seriously enough the necessity of having a president able or willing to say, "I don't think that sounds right." Or, "I don't think that will work. Show me another way."

So Douglas Feith has been wrong about everything, and an incompetent administrator to boot.

Well, that's not particularly surprising. Pick any war, and you'll find your share of lousy officials. Lincoln went through half the officer corps before he found Grant.
But the point is, Lincoln kept firing his generals until he found the right guy. That's what chief executives in any sphere are supposed to do when subordinates screw up. What's amazing about the Bush administration is that the only people who get canned are the ones who offer accurate assessments, whether it's [former national economic adviser] Lawrence Lindsey on the cost of the war or [former Army Chief of Staff ] General [Eric] Shinseki on the number of troops needed to occupy the country ... Whether it's George Tenet in intelligence or Douglas Feith in postwar planning, the sheer magnitude of their incompetence makes them untouchable. That's why, after Donald Rumsfeld presided over what is arguably the worst foreign policy scandal in 200 years, at Abu Ghraib, President Bush didn't fire him, but rather praised him as the best defense secretary this country ever had. If Lincoln were that tolerant of failure, it would have been Winfield Scott, not Ulysses Grant, across the table from Lee at Appomattox, except it would have been the Union Army that was surrendering.
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The above is an excerpt from Allison Hantschel's introductory essay to "Special Plans, the blogs on Douglas Feith and the faulty intelligence that led us to war."