Feith calls prewar lies 'good government'
He should be tarred and feathered for that alone.
Douglas J. Feith, the former undersecretary of Defense for policy, appeared on "Fox News Sunday" to explain his actions and that of his Office of Special Plans, following the release Friday of a highly critical report by the Pentagon's inspector general.The report concluded that Feith, a leading architect of the policies that led to the Iraq war, briefed senior Bush administration officials on the purportedly strong links between al-Qaida and Iraq that did not accurately reflect the views of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. It also said Feith and his aides sought to discredit and bypass those intelligence officials because they were strongly discounting alleged ties between the terrorist network and Saddam Hussein's regime.
The inspector general's review found that the actions of Feith's office were not illegal or unauthorized, describing them as an inappropriate "alternative" analysis.
Unbelievable.
This wasn't an academic exercise, or a lousy law review article that tarnished an institution's reputation for scholarship.
This was FABRICATED INTELLIGENCE deliberately introduced to the Chief Executive Officer of our nation in order to set it AT WAR with another - and, as a result, hundreds of thousands of people have died.
Feith sought to portray his actions and those of his staffers as part of the normal give-and-take of government in the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. He indicated that, at the time, he thought the CIA in particular was missing important ties between al-Qaida and Saddam's regime."It's healthy to criticize the CIA's intelligence," Feith told "Fox News Sunday." "What the people in the Pentagon were doing was right. It was good government."
The inspector general's report concluded that there was virtually no support for the Pentagon policy office's assessment that "intelligence indicates cooperation in all categories" and a "mature symbiotic relationship" between al-Qaida and Iraq at the time Feith's office was presenting those findings to top White House officials.
Feith's office also claimed that an alleged April 2001 meeting in Prague, Czech Repbublic, between Sept. 11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent was a known contact; it has since been widely discredited by the 9/11 Commission and the Senate intelligence committee.
"All of that was wrong, wasn't it?" "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace asked Feith, referring to his office's conclusions.
"No, not at all," Feith responded. "There was substantial intelligence.... There was a lot of information out there."
Feith also said that "no one in my office ever claimed there was an operational relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaida. That claim was immediately questioned by some administration critics.
"It's an abject lie, and it completely ignores what is in the documented public record," Larry C. Johnson, a former State Department and CIA counterterrorism official, said in an interview Sunday. "I think the problem is across the board that we have convenient memory loss. No one wants to go back and hold people accountable to what they were doing."
On his blog, noquarter.typepad.com, Johnson wrote Sunday that Feith repeatedly had claimed such a relationship, particularly in a still-classified memo dated Oct. 27, 2003, that was sent to the leadership of the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The 16-page memo was later leaked to a conservative magazine, which reported on it extensively. The resulting article was later cited by Cheney as "the best source of information" on al-Qaida/Iraq ties.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the intelligence panel, told CNN's "Late Edition" that not only were Feith's actions "inappropriate," but that "there are serious questions about whether Mr. Feith broke the 1947 statute that requires that our committee be informed" of his office's activities.
That's all?
What a joke.
This Alice in Wonderland crap must end.
People have died and are dying. Someone must PAY.
A great little rhyme I found at Johnson's No Quarter blog:
You gotta admit, Wolfie's Boy sure got one hell of a resume'!
........................
[ When George W. Bush assumed the presidency in January 2001, Wolfowitz got his opportunity. Picked as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy secretary at DOD, he prevailed upon his boss to appoint Douglas Feith as undersecretary for policy. On SEPT. 12, 2001, THE DAY AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz raised the possibility of an IMMEDIATE ATTACK ON IRAQ during an emergency NSC meeting. The following day, Wolfowitz conducted the Pentagon press briefing, and interpreted the president’s statement on “ending states who sponsor terrorism” as a call for regime change in Iraq. Israel wasn’t mentioned ]...............
DOUGLAS FEITH : HARD-LINER SECURITY RISK
Bush’s appointment of Douglas Feith as DOD undersecretary for policy in early 2001 must have come as a surprise, and a harbinger, even to conservative veterans of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Like Michael Ledeen, Feith is a prolific writer and well-known radical conservative. Moreover, he was not being hired as a DOD consultant, like Ledeen, but as the third most senior United States Defense Department official. Feith was certainly the first, and probably the last, high Pentagon official to have publicly opposed the Biological Weapons Convention (in 1986), the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (in 1988), the Chemical Weapons Convention (in 1997), the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (in 2000), and all of the various Middle East Peace agreements, including Oslo (in 2000).
Even more revealing, perhaps—had the transition team known of it—was Feith’s view of “technology cooperation,” as expressed in a 1992 Commentary article: “It is in the interest of U.S. and Israel to remove needless impediments to technological cooperation between them. Technologies in the hands of responsible, friendly countries facing military threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance regional stability and promote peace thereby.”
What Douglas Feith had neglected to say, in this last article, was that he thought that individuals could decide on their own whether the sharing of classified information was “technical cooperation,” an unauthorized disclosure, or a violation of U.S. CODE 794C, THE “ESPIONAGE ACT.”
Ten years prior to writing the Commentary piece, Feith had made such a decision on his own. At the time—March of 1982—Feith was a Middle East analyst in the Near East and South Asian Affairs section of the National Security Council. Two months before, in January, Judge William Clark had replaced Richard Allen as national security adviser, with the intention to clean house. A total of nine NSC staff members were fired, including Feith, who’d only been with the NSC for a year. But Feith was fired because he’d been the object of an inquiry into whether he’d provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. The FBI had opened the inquiry. And Clark, who had served in U.S. Army counterintelligence in the 1950s, took such matters very seriously…more seriously, apparently, than had Richard Allen.
Feith did not remain unemployed for long, however. As mentioned previously, in 1982 Richard Perle was serving in the Pentagon as assistant secretary for international security policy, and hired Feith on the spot as his “special counsel,” then as his deputy. Feith worked at ISP until 1986, when he left government service to form a small but influential law firm, then based in Israel.
In 2001, Douglas Feith, having returned to DOD as Donald Rumsfeld’s undersecretary for policy, created in his office the “OSP,” or Office of Special Plans. It was OSP that originated—some say from whole cloth—much of the intelligence that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have used to justify the attack on Iraq, to mis-plan the post-war reconstruction there, and then to point an accusing finger at Iran and Syria…all to the absolute delight of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. (excerpted)
Stephen Green is a Vermont-based free-lance journalist. This article first appeared in CounterPunch, Feb. 28-29, 2004.
It should be a post on its own
perhaps, with a link to the original article - if you have one.
Your own excellent post will surely suffice, Q.... along with a large bucket of hot tar and some worn out pillows.
Ahhhh, ... Douglas J. Feith as head of this 'Office of Special Plans' in the Pentagon, makes it sound really like the Bolshevik Soviet Union KGB's Spetzoperazye (Special Tasks) Department. Col. Pavel Sudoplatov was head of it in 1930-1950 and has written a very interesting book about these 'special tasks' ... The Neo-Cons' Pentagon like the Bolsheviks' Lubianka??? Well, it's the same people's deeds after all, why be surprised?
Funny you should mention it, but your evocation of the KGB's Spetzoperazye Department ( and their "Special Tasks" ) as a dead ringer for Feith's 'OSP' ( and his "Special Plans" ) is not the only unfortunate comparison that has arisen before. This one is quite a bit more up my alley. And who, of all people, did it originate with, other than our upstanding former General & Secretary of State, Colin Powell ! Just imagine such an upstanding Benedict Arnold as that, referring to our top level "Office of Special Plans" as Feith's "GESTAPO OFFICE" ! Could this be the fabled "Ashke-NAZI Fifth Column you refer to in our labyrinthine discourse, popping up in our own midst ? What were we ever saying about, "History Repeats Itself" ? What could we possibly have been thinking ? From Bolshevik Lubianka to WHAT ? Since Qrs was cogitating for another link to the foregoing, to which I averred, I will at last relent, and compromise, with the following:
January 20, 2006
"Fixed" Intelligence from Feith's "Gestapo Office," the CIA and the Bush Administration's Impeachable Lies about Iraq's Prewar Links to al Qaeda
By Walter C. Uhler ( excerpted )
----Bogus intelligence, however, was percolating up to Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney from what Secretary of State, Colin Powell, called "Feith's 'Gestapo office.'" 105
On July 22, 2002, Ms. Shelton sent an email to Mr. Cambone that recounted the events of a meeting held with Feith that day. Feith, it appears, asked an assistant "to prepare an intel briefing on Iraq and links to al-Qaeda for the SecDef and that he was not to tell anyone about it." 106
During the summer of 2002, a special assistant to Wolfowitz created a set of briefing slides that incorporated Ms. Shelton's work, as well as the work of the PCEG's two naval reservists. The intent of the slides was to outline Rumsfeld's "views of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda." 107 The slides also "criticized the Intelligence Community…for its approach to the issue." 108
According to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report, these briefing slides continued to claim that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague in April 2001. A "findings" slide summed up the briefing by claiming: (1) "More than a decade of numerous contacts," (2) "Multiple areas of cooperation," (3) "Shared interest and pursuit of WMD," and (4) "One indication of Iraq coordination with al-Qaeda specifically related to 9/11." 109
Very telling was the slide that criticized the IC's handling of its Iraq-al Qaeda intelligence. It blamed the IC for "consistent underestimation" of efforts by Iraq and al Qeada to hide their relationship and faulted the IC for its "assumption that secularists and Islamists will not cooperate." 110 Most telling, however, was the criticism that the IC required "juridical evidence" for its findings.111
Juridical indeed! Who, except for the dishonest and reckless, would refuse to acknowledge the immense moral obligation to get the intelligence right, when contemplating preemptive war (see my article on preemption, http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/preemption.html ).
Consequently, on the matter of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, who best understood the moral obligation to get it right? The agents of the IC or the scattershot Rumsfeld gang operating under his instructions to "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related, and not?" Then, ask yourself, who actually got it right?
Nevertheless, as we now know, the slides were presented to Rumsfeld in early August 2002. According to Wolfowitz, it "was an excellent briefing. The Secretary was very impressed." 112 Wolfowitz also recommended that the briefing be presented to the CIA, where, perhaps, "each side might make an assessment" 113 of the evidence.
On August 15, 2002 Feith and staff took their briefing to the CIA, except for the slide critical of the agency. Following the briefing, Mr. Tenet " requested that the two OUSD(P) briefers speak with the CTC and the NESA experts on Iraq and terrorism."114 According to one member of the PCEG, "Tenet agreed to postpone the release" of what would become September's report (Iraqi Support for Terrorism) "until analysts from the CTC, NESA, NSA, and the DIA could meet with the OUSD(P) briefers to discuss the issue." 115
That meeting took place on August 20, 2002. According to the IC's analysts, members of Feith's staff "were concerned about 'too many caveats in the reporting' and the 'tone' of the draft IC report. Feith's staff also pressed dubious information, including criticizing the draft IC report for omitting reference to the 'key issue of Atta.'" 116
Moreover, Senator Carl Levin has obtained documents demonstrating "that Feith's staff requested, both verbally and in written form, at least 32 changes to the IC draft, including inserting raw intelligence reports that had previously been omitted, deleting others, and altering the characterization of certain issues and raw reporting." 117 In all, "16 changes were made, 14 were not, and for 2 the outcome is indeterminate." 118
Thus, Levin concludes, "even though the IC analysts refused to incorporate information which they believed was dubious into their judgments about the Iraq-al Qeada relationship, and the IC analysts remained skeptical of that relationship, nonetheless raw, questionable intelligence reports were incorporated in the IC document because of advocacy of Under Secretary Feith and his staff." 119
Unbeknownst to the CIA at the time, Feith took his act to the White House on September 16, 2002, where his staffers briefed Condoleezza Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, and Cheney's chief of staff, the now indicted "Scooter" Libby. The briefing contained the slides presented to Rumsfeld, including the slide criticizing the IC, but with "additional information" about Atta's alleged meeting in Prague, "potential common procurement intermediaries shared by Iraq and al Qaeda, and other possible connections." 120
"'The briefing went very well and generated further interest from Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby,' who requested a number of items, including a 'chronology of Atta's travels.'" 121
Cheney had long been wired (through Ravich, Libby and Rumsfeld) to Feith's group. Moreover, as Murray Waas has reported, Cheney wrote in the margins of one of Feith's reports about ties between Saddam and al Qaeda: "this is very good … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of the CIA." 122
Speaking on "Meet the Press" on September 9, 2002, Cheney claimed "We've seen in connection with the hijackers of course, Mohammed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center." 123
But, if Cheney was not basing his assertions about Saddam's ties to al Qaeda on the "crap" from the Intelligence Community, but from Feith's rogue intelligence cell, then Cheney lied when he claimed that evidence of Atta in Prague with "a senior Iraqi intelligence official," was deemed "credible" by the CIA. 124
Continuing the drumbeat for war on the eve of an October Congressional vote in support of the war, Bush warned on September 25th about the danger "that al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness." 125 That same day, National Security Adviser Rice told PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer: "Yes, there clearly are contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq that can be documented. There clearly is testimony that some of these contacts have been important contacts and there's a relationship here."126
Finally, who can forget Donald Rumsfeld's claim, made two days later, "that American intelligence had 'bulletproof' evidence of links between al Qaeda and the government of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq." 127 And speaking as though the February 2002 DIA report didn't exist, Rumsfeld asserted: "We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical- and biological-agent training."128
"American intelligence" did not have "bulletproof" evidence. In fact, "American intelligence," construed to mean the established Intelligence Community funded by and responsible to the U.S. Congress, found no "bulletproof" evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda.
Instead it was "un-American intelligence," that supported the "bulletproof" evidence claimed by Rumsfeld. And it was "un-American intelligence" about Iraq's links to al Qaeda that was used by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice to beat the drums for war on the eve of the Congressional vote.
The "un-American intelligence" came from a rogue intelligence cell set up by a leading member of the Bush administration's war party, Saddam-obsessed Paul Wolfowitz, who believed Mossad's biased intelligence and not American intelligence. And it was headed by Feith, who General Tommy Franks called "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth," and whose primary loyalty was to Israel (see Notes number 37 and 66.)
Inspired by Mossad, Feith's rogue intelligence cell appears to have solicited, reexamined, digested and regurgitated evidence from the programmed liars put forward by Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress - evidence that the Intelligence Community already had considered, before dismissing as unreliable. Then, as Seymour Hersh has noted: "A routine settled in: the Pentagon's defector reports, classified 'secret,' would be funneled to newspapers, but subsequent analyses of the reports by intelligence agencies - scathing but also classified - would remain secret."129
Perhaps, that explains why even Secretary of State Colin Powell privately referred to Feith's intelligence cell as "Feith's Gestapo office." How ironic! Neocon Jews running a "Gestapo office." Finally, and most significantly, let's not forget that this "un-American intelligence" got it wrong!
Can the United States still be called a "democracy," if a majority of its citizens fails to recognize and redress such "un-American" behavior? ("Un-American," at least according to our ideals, if not our actual history.)
Unfortunately, some Americans seek to dismiss this shameful episode. Others simply want to "move on." Still others want to cover it up. Thus, the question: "Do we bring the perpetrators to justice or do we simply let history record their dishonest march to war?"
I, for one, agree with the renowned conservative Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld: "For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C. sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins." 130
entire article here- http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:gaaffgb4gE0J:www.walter-c-uhler.com/...
Walter C. Uhler.com--"Fixed" Intelligence from Feith's "Gestapo Office," the CIA and the Bush Administration's Impeachable Lies about Iraq's Prewar Links to al Qaeda