Ex-defense official takes aim over war’s run-up

[Gunny]

By Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung
Washinton Post
updated 6:12 a.m. CT, Sun., March. 9, 2008

WASHINGTON - In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.

Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush's policies.

Among the disclosures made by Feith in "War and Decision," scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush's declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that "war is inevitable." The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a "momentous comment."

Although he acknowledges "serious errors" in intelligence, policy and operational plans surrounding the invasion, Feith blames them on others outside the Pentagon and notes that "even the best planning" cannot avoid all problems in wartime. While he says the decision to invade was correct, he judges that the task of creating a viable and stable Iraqi government was poorly executed and remains "grimly incomplete."

Powell, Feith argues, allowed himself to be publicly portrayed as a dove, but while Powell "downplayed" the degree and urgency of Iraq's threat, he never expressed opposition to the invasion. Bremer, meanwhile, is said to have done more harm than good in Iraq. Feith also accuses Franks of being uninterested in postwar planning, and writes that Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser during most of Feith's time in office, failed in her primary task of coordinating policy on the war.

more ... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23544363/

Interesting perspective.

 

[Annie]

Interesting perspective.

That looks worth the cost to buy, thanks for finding that.

 

[rayboyusmc]

I read somewhere back several year ago, where one of those involved in the Iraq fiasco, called Feith the dumbest person he ever met.

I guess there are two or more sides to every story.

Douglas Feith is a former Pentagon official closely associated with the neoconservative political faction who has been investigated for allegedly distorting prewar intelligence on Iraq. Feith served as the deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, the number three position at the Pentagon, from July 2001 to August 2005. In May 2006, Georgetown University hired him to teach a course on the Bush administration's strategy in the war on terror.

Feith's resignation from the Department of Defense sparked widespread speculation among observers that he was pressured to leave because of a number of then-ongoing investigations related to the administration's efforts to bolster support for the Iraq War. As Juan Cole, history professor at the University of Michigan and author of the widely read blog Informed Comment (JuanCole.com) wrote in January 2005, when Feith announced his resignation:

"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 (AIPAC), 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-Qaida, and that he is among the chief facilitators of the U.S. 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."

Although Feith was not formally charged in connection to his work at the Pentagon, his work has been repeatedly investigated, and official reports have linked him to efforts to push faulty evidence to justify the war. One investigation, by the Department of Defense's inspector general (IG), was set up to assess whether the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a specialized outfit set up by Feith within the Pentagon to scrutinize intelligence on Iraq, deliberately skewed information about the regime of Saddam Hussein (New York Times, May 25, 2006).

The IG's unclassified report, released in April 2007, corroborated allegations that Feith was behind efforts to erroneously connect Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime with al-Qaida. The report found that despite widespread consensus among intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), that there was no conclusive evidence linking Iraq to al-Qaida, Feith ignored these conclusions. In a September 2002 briefing delivered to Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration higher-ups, Feith asserted that the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida was, according to a Washington Post account, "'mature' and 'symbiotic,' marked by shared interests and evidenced by cooperation across 10 categories, including training, financing, and logistics." The report also stated that it is "noteworthy ... that post-war debriefs of Saddam Hussein, [former Iraqi Foreign Minister] Tariq Aziz, [former Iraqi Intelligence Minister Mani al-Rashid] al Tikriti, and [senior al-Qaida operative Ibn al-Shaykh] al-Libi, as well as document exploitation by DIA, all confirmed that the Intelligence Community was correct: Iraq and al-Qaida did not cooperate in all categories" alleged by Feith's office (Washington Post, April 6, 2007).

Besides his work with the OSP, Feith was also responsible for establishing two controversial offices in the Pentagon during the lead up to the war in Iraq: the Office of Strategic Intelligence, which was closed down after creating a furor in Congress because of its purported aim of "providing news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of an effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers" (New York Times, January 27, 2005), and the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a small intel outfit that investigated Saddam Hussein's ties to al-Qaida, producing reports that directly contradicted CIA conclusions about such ties (New York Times, May 25, 2006).

Someday, you are going to read a whole lot about the shenanigans of one Douglas J. Feith and an elaborate scheme to get the United States to invade Iraq. That is because Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., has been determined to get to the bottom of this sordid tale and is now, fortunately, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee and thereby empowered to get at the truth.

Last week, his focus led to the partial declassification of a report produced by the Pentagon’s inspector general. Although its shocking revelations did not get the coverage they deserved—what with a jealous astronaut under arrest and the death of a certain voluptuous stripper/heiress—efforts such as Levin’s eventually will uncover the full picture of why President Bush committed to a war costing tens of thousands of lives and an expected $1 trillion that served no valid national security purpose.

The tale begins with Feith, who was appointed undersecretary of defense for policy in the Pentagon by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after Bush was installed in the White House in 2000 by the Supreme Court. Feith’s office manufactured an “Alternative Analysis on the Iraq-Al Qaeda Relationship,” which ignored the consensus of the intelligence community that the two natural enemies—one a secular Arab government, the other a fundamentalist terror group bent on destruction of same—were not, nor ever had been, working together, despite a shared enmity for the United States.

Most important, as the Pentagon’s independent inspector general noted, the intelligence did not support any connection between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the brutal Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, such an apocryphal connection was asserted repeatedly by the Bush administration based largely on the cherry-picked information compiled and presented by Feith’s highly ideological group within the Pentagon.

“ntelligence indicates cooperation in all categories” and a “mature symbiotic relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaida, Feith conveniently reported to superiors who had already decided on the need to overthrow Saddam and were seeking a way to link it to Americans’ rage at Osama bin Laden. These alleged “multiple areas of cooperation” included “shared interest and pursuit” of weapons of mass destruction and “some indications of possible Iraq coordination with al Qaeda related to 9/11.” All of those claims were known by the intelligence community to be false or completely unproven, as documented by the nonpartisan 9/11 commission. Yet, they were presented by Feith’s office “unbeknownst to the Director of Central Intelligence,” according to the report, were “not vetted by the Intelligence Community” and were “not supported by the available intelligence.”

The most glaring distortion was Feith’s indefensible reliance on a shaky, discredited report from a Czech intelligence agent who said 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had a meeting with a top Iraqi diplomat in Prague five months before Sept. 11, 2001. As the 9/11 commission reported, there was never any good evidence of such a meeting, yet Vice President Dick Cheney continued to assert it as true, long after the facts were known. Cheney even called Feith’s report the “best source of information” on the alleged relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida after it was leaked to the neoconservative Weekly Standard.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070213_before_the_invasion_there_was_feith/

Of all the revelations that have surfaced about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal so far, the least surprising is that Douglas Feith may be partly responsible. Not a single Iraq war screw-up has gone by without someone tagging Feith—who, as the Defense Department's undersecretary for policy, is the Pentagon's No. 3 civilian, after Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz—as the guy to blame. Feith, who ranks with Wolfowitz in purity of neoconservative fervor, has turned out to be Michael Dukakis in reverse: ideology without competence.

It's not that the 50-year-old Feith is at fault for everything that's gone wrong in Iraq. He's only tangentially related to the mystery of the missing weapons of mass destruction, for example. (Though it's a significant tangent: An anonymous "Pentagon insider" told the Washington Times last year that Feith was the person who urged the Bush administration to make Saddam's WMD the chief public rationale for going to war immediately.) Nor was it Feith who made the decision to commit fewer troops than the generals requested. (Though Feith did give the most honest explanation for the decision, saying last year that it "makes our military less usable" if hundreds of thousands of troops are needed to fight wars.) But if he isn't fully culpable for all these fiascos, he's still implicated in them somehow. He's a leading indicator, like a falling Dow—something that correlates with but does not cause disaster.

Start with Abu Ghraib. Feith's office was in charge of Iraq's military prisons, but that's not the only reason his name keeps turning up in newspaper reports about the scandal. It was Feith who devised the legal solution for getting around the Geneva Conventions' prohibition on physically or psychologically coercing prisoners of war into talking. As a Pentagon official in the 1980s, Feith had laid out the argument that terrorists didn't deserve protection under the Geneva Conventions. Once the war on terrorism started, all he had to do was implement it. And even more damning than his legal rule-making is Feith's reported reaction to complaints by military Judge Advocate General lawyers about the new, looser interrogation rules. "They said he had a dismissive, if not derisive, attitude toward the Geneva Conventions," Scott Horton, a lawyer who was approached by six outraged JAG officers last year, told the Chicago Tribune. "One of them said he calls it 'law in the service of terror.' "

http://www.slate.com/id/2100899/


Maybe Feith is into revisionist history to make him look like a good guy?

 

[rayboyusmc]

It was General Tommy Franks who called Feith, "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the planet."