1 Boring Old Man

BLITZER: I mean, these are serious — when you were confronted by the IG, the inspector general, who — who disagrees with you on the nature of whether or not this was intelligence or not intelligence, you made your case, but he didn’t buy it.
FEITH: The inspector general, with all due respect, was in an area of opinion for which there are no legal standards, and he made an argument that is self-contradictory, doesn’t hang together.
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The essence of his argument was that criticism of intelligence is intelligence work. Ridiculous.
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The other argument that he made was that our work was not the highest quality. How do you do that? He didn’t evaluate our work and the work we were criticizing. He didn’t look at the underlying intelligence.
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What the inspector general did is he said the work that we did was at variance with the consensus of the intelligence community. Well, of course it was. It was a critique of the intelligence community’s consensus. That’s exactly what it was intended to be.
BLITZER: But I just want to be precise on this. Rockefeller says you never informed Congress of your activities. Is he right on that front? Whether or not legally you were required to do so according to the National Security…
FEITH: No. In fact, I mean, all of these activities were the subject of hearings and document requests. I mean, Congress was thoroughly informed.
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What he’s saying is he is calling something that was a perfectly reasonable policy project of criticizing the intelligence, he’s calling that an intelligence activity, and then saying we should have informed it as an intelligence activity to Congress. And it wasn’t an intelligence activity.

This is just a piece of Feith’s use of a Talking Point, a characteristic of Bush Administration officials that we’ve come to see as universal in their public interviews. The Talking Point is that Feith’s Office of Special Plans in the Defense Department was not an alternative intelligence agency, it was set up to "criticize" the C.I.A. because they were stuck in a some mindset. Earlier in the day, Feith had said this amazing thing:

This was not alternative intelligence assessment. It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance."

So this Talking Point gets kind of murky. The work of the O.S.P. was intended to be different from the consensus of the Intelligence Community [as a criticism] and "I wasn’t endorsing its substance." What in the hell does he even mean by that? Feith presented a briefing entitled Iraq and al-Qaeda: Making the Case three times – to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, to the C.I.A., and to Hadley and Libby. In the presentation to the C.I.A., he left out the slide that criticized the C.I.A. and in the presentation to Hadley and Libby, he didn’t mention that the intelligence community didn’t agree with him. Later, he leaked a memo to the Weekly Standard that laid out this argument and resulted in an article entitled Case Closed [meaning that the Al Qaeda·Iraq connection was a sure thing]. The Vice President and other officials repeatedly used his points in public speeches – presenting them as facts. So, the Talking Point is what? He was just playing devil’s advocate? It wasn’t really intelligence? He never endorsed it? This is one confusing Talking Point Feith is trying to push. And then he is reframing what he’s accused of into he’s being persecuted for criticising the C.I.A. Don’t we wish that’s all he did? Criticize the C.I.A. What he actually did is create a bunch of pseudo-intelligence that confirmed the Administration’s decision to invade Iraq – pseudo-intelligence that they used ad nauseum. They still connect the Iraq War with 911 and Al Qaeda, though slightly less directly than in the past.

My father had a saying to cover things like Feith’s Talking Point. "I don’t mind you peeing in my boot, but don’t tell me it’s water."