Pentagon Report Finds Killing Over 600,000 Iraqis (For Israel) "Inappropriate" But Not Illegal
If only they were being facetious . . .
Related
Report says Pentagon manipulated pre-war intelligence
Pentagon did "inappropriate" Iraq work, sources say
Treason is not illegal?
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Pentagon says pre-war intel was not illegal. The report found that former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith had not engaged in illegal activities through the creation of special offices to review intelligence. Some Democrats also have contended that Feith misled Congress about the basis of the administration's assertions on the threat posed by Iraq, but the Pentagon investigation did not support that.:The report found that former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith had not engaged in illegal activities through the creation of special offices to review intelligence. Some Democrats also have contended that Feith misled Congress about the basis of the administration's assertions on the threat posed by Iraq, but the Pentagon investigation did not support that.
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The Pentagram is lying through its teeth regarding legality.
From Juan Cole:
"Speaking of scams, Neoconservative Douglas Feith is teaching at Georgetown."
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"Doug Feith betrayed the United States by getting up a false case for war with Iraq. He made it clear in 1996 that his motivations for an Iraq War had to do primarily with Israel, and, indeed, with a far Right agenda of simultaneously pushing to destroy the Labor Party in Israel, to permanently annex the West Bank, and to overthrow Syria. At the Pentagon, he also ran an authoritarian shop that punished and marginalized anyone who stood in his way. He allegedly had State Department personnel spied on and excluded from meetings. He is not "mild-mannered." He just doesn't show the iron fist in public. He is writing a book, but needn't bother. The Dems are likely to subpoena documents that will make for far more interesting reading."
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Pentagon criticizes key pre-Iraq war findings of top Rumsfeld aide
AFP
15 minutes ago
Former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld's top policy aide produced "alternative" intelligence reports linking Saddam Hussein and the Al-Qaeda terror network to bolster the case for war with Iraq, according to a Pentagon investigation.
The work done by the Pentagon office headed by Douglas Feith was "inappropriate," though neither illegal nor unauthorized, according to portions of a classified report released Friday by Democratic Senator Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record).
The report is a "devastating condemnation" of the office headed by former undersecretary of defense Feith, a civilian, who had a key role in drumming up domestic and international political support for invading Iraq in 2003, said Levin in a statement.
Levin will hear Friday from Department of Defense Inspector General Thomas Gimble who is scheduled to present the investigation's classified findings to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which the senator chairs.
The Pentagon investigation focused on the Policy Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, created by then-deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States to look for state sponsors of terrorism.
The office "developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al-Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community, to senior decision-makers," the unclassified summary of the report said.
The report said that Feith's office "was inappropriately performing intelligence activities of developing, producing and disseminating that should be performed by the intelligence community."
The report refers to allegations made by Feith in 2002 and 2003 that Saddam had active links to Al-Qaeda, allegations used by the administration of President George W. Bush to link the invasion of Iraq to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
The report said that Feith's intelligence activities had been authorized by Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz, Levin said.
Feith's reports were used by top government officials including Vice President Dick Cheney.
"Indeed, Vice President Cheney said the principal Feith office assessment was the 'best source of information' on the alleged relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda," Levin said.
Feith, who resigned his Pentagon post in 2005 to take up a post at Georgetown University in Washington, lashed back at critics and said the report vindicates him.
"The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations that its pre-Iraq war work was somehow 'unlawful' or 'unauthorized' and that some information it gave to congressional committees was deceptive or misleading," he said in a statement.
"The inspector general's report has now thoroughly repudiated the smears."
However Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democrat that heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that Feith may have violated the 1947 National Security Act by failing to keep congress informed.
"The IG (Inspector General) has concluded that (Feith's) office was engaged in intelligence activities. The Senate Intelligence Committee was never informed of these activities," Rockefeller said in a statement.
"Whether these actions were authorized or not, it appears that they were not in compliance with the law," he said.
Eric Edelman, Feith's successor at the Pentagon and a former Cheney aide, said in a rebuttal to the report that Wolfowitz asked Feith's analysts to ignore the intelligence community's belief that the radical Islamist Al-Qaeda and Saddam's secular dictatorship were unlikely allies.
Feith's unit was one of three offices that received intelligence on Iraq as the Bush administration made its case for ousting Saddam, Edelman said.
The office delivered three separate reports, none of which was an "assessment of any sort," according to Edelman's rebuttal.
The strongest evidence Feith's office produced linking Saddam and Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda was an alleged meeting in April 2001 in Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence officer and Mohamed Atta, who led the deadly September 11 attacks months later.
At the time the CIA had doubts about the meeting, and both the CIA and the FBI later concluded it never took place.
The bipartisan September 11 commission that issued a lengthy report in 2004 on events leading up to the 2001 terror attacks found no evidence linking Al-Qaeda to Saddam's regime
A little refresher course from two years ago, also from Mr. Juan Cole, to jog our beleaguered memories a bit more about just who we're dealing with here ( with obligatory apologia ) Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
Friday, January 28, 2005
Feith Resigns Under Pressure of Investigations
Douglas Feith, the number three man at the Pentagon who went there from the pro-Likud Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Project for a New American Century, will leave the Pentagon as of this summer. Feith's office is the subject of an FBI investigation as well as two Congressional investigations, one by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Feith helped set up an Office of Special Plans in the Near East and South Asia desk of the Pentagon to cherry-pick Iraq intelligence and create a case for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and having operational links with al-Qaeda. At one point, contrary to Federal law, Feith's people actually briefed officials in the Executive on intelligence. Feith seems to have used David Wurmser a a liason of some sort, employing him at OSP before he later went to other key advisory offices at the State Department and finally in 2003 to Vice President Dic Cheney's office. Wurmser, who has ties to the Likud, is working for a US war against Iran and Syria. [An earlier version of this post got the sequence wrong out of a memory lapse.] The OSP was somehow able to get its analyses and false intelligence conclusions directly to Cheney's national security staff, from which they went directly to Bush, by-passing the CIA and the State Department Intelligence and Research division.
Having a Likudnik as the number three man in the Pentagon is a nightmare for American national security, since Feith could never be trusted to put US interests over those of Ariel Sharon. In the build-up to the Iraq War, Feith had a phalanx of Israeli generals visiting him in the Pentagon and ignored post-9/11 requirements that they sign in. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a vocal advocate of a US war against Iraq, who "put pressure" on Washington about it. (If Sharon wanted a war against Iraq, why didn't he fight it himself instead of pushing it off on American boys?)
Feith has been questioned by the FBI in relation to the passing by one of his employees of confidential Pentagon documents to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which in turn passed them to the Israeli embassy. The Senate Intelligence Committee is also investigating Feith. There seems little doubt that he operated in the Pentagon in such a way as to produce false and misleading "intelligence," that he created an entirely false impression of Iraqi weapons capabilities and ties to al-Qaeda, and that he is among the chief facilitators of the US war in Iraq.
Feith is clearly resigning ahead of the possible breaking of major scandals concerning his tenure at the Department of Defense, which is among the more disgraceful cases of the misleading of the American people in American history.
There are several downsides to Feith's departure, as welcome as it is for anyone who cares about US security in particular. The first is that now we probably have to see him 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 is that his departure now may help keep Bush from being blamed for his shady dealings in intelligence "analysis."
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 (and which was therefore on the same side of this issue as the fanatic who assassinated 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 Slobodon Milosevic as the number three man in the Pentagon. It is ideological dual loyalty that is dangerous. Mere sentiment based on multiple ethnic identities is not dual loyalty, and hyphenated Americans mostly have other countries they wish well (and rightly so).
It is also important to underline that only a small minority of American Jews support the Likud Party or its policies, and that a majority of Jewish Americans opposed the Iraq war. In short, the problematic nature of Feith's tenure at the Department of Defense must not be made an excuse for any kind of bigotry. ........................................and ..........so we're letting this rat off the hook ? Hello ?