Looking back over my endless posts yesterday, I can see that I have some strong feelings about Douglas Feith – stronger than I knew. But it wasn’t until I saw him on Blitzer’s Situation Room that I figured out why. He embodies for me the essence of Neoconservative arrogance – William Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Laurie Mylroie, etc. They are Academics, and they remind me of the some of the not so luminary Academics from my college professor days – the ones whose scholarly pursuits and instant expertise are more for self-aggrandizement that from any devotion to scholarship. Douglas Feith talked down to Blitzer, not with contempt like Cheney, but with condescention. I’m so put off by Feith’s manner and style that it’s hard to focus on what he says.
During the Clinton years, there was a strong sentiment among the Neoconservatives that the C.I.A. was leading us astray. They felt that Clinton was chasing rogue, rag-tag organizations like Al Qaeda, when it should realize that they were simply pawns of States – States like Iraq and Iran. Only States could mount such attacks. This was a theme in most American Enterprise Institute presentations. Back them, Laurie Mylroie and Michael Ledeen were the darlings there, and couldn’t stop talking about it. There was an offshoot group, The Project for the New American Century, who actively lobbied Clinton on this point, advocating Paul Wolfowitz’s policy of American Dominion and fomenting war with Iraq. And Douglas Feith was right in the middle of it all. You can read his pre-government history on Right Web and Wikipedia. He’s the son of a Holocaust survivor, and in reviewing his story and affiliations, it’s hard to tell if he’s an American or an Israeli. Such comments are often seen as antisemetic, but when you look at his biography, you’ll see what I mean. He was suspected of passing information to Israel as far back as the 1980’s, and one of his employees, Larry Franklin, was convicted of giving information to Israeli officials last year.
The campaign in the Defense Department against Iraq began in earnest on September 11th, 2001. When Donald Rumsfeld tasked his Deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to begin to look for ties between Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and Hussein’s Iraq. Cambone‘s notes:
This was, to me, the Moment of Infamy. Whether it was just Rumsfeld’s bias, or, more ominously, what they had been waiting for isn’t for today, but this was the moment of action for the Iraq War. Ultimately, Wolfowitz appointed his Deputy for Policy, Douglas Feith, to head up that search by forming the Office of Special Plans in the Defense Department. From the Washington Post this morning:
Focused on the question of Iraq’s ties to al-Qaeda, Gimble’s report concentrated on findings that Feith’s office presented in three briefings in August and September 2002 — one to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, one to the CIA, and one at the White House to then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff.
Laying out a chronology of events, Gimble said Wolfowitz asked Feith in January 2002 "to assess the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq." The following July, he told the committee, a group of Pentagon employees assigned to Feith’s office "compiled a position paper that was later translated into a briefing."
The briefing, titled "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Making the Case," was given to Rumsfeld on Aug. 8. In a memo to Feith’s office that day, Wolfowitz described it as "excellent."
"The secretary was very impressed," Wolfowitz wrote. "He asked us to think about some possible next steps to see if we can illuminate the differences between us and the CIA. The goal is not to produce a consensus product, but rather to scrub one another’s arguments."
Rumsfeld then directed that the briefing be presented to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.
Before an Aug. 15 briefing for Tenet, however, analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA and other agencies critiqued the briefing. In particular, they questioned Feith’s conclusion that a "known contact" had taken place in Prague in April 2001 between a senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center in September of that year. "Essentially, they disagreed with more than 50 percent of it and either agreed or partially agreed with the remainder," Gimble said yesterday.…Briefing Hadley and Libby, Gimble said, Feith’s group did not mention that the intelligence community disagreed with more than half of its conclusions. Tenet, Gimble said, did not learn of the White House briefing until two years later.
The slides from those presentations make the case for Al Qaeda/Iraq connections look pretty compelling. If there’s any question about Feith’s opinion on this matter, read his later internal memo to Senators Levin and Rockefeller, in Case Closed , the memo Feith apparently personally leaked to Kristof’s Weekly Standard [according to Karen Kwiatkowski, a military whistle-blower who worked under Feith]. Here‘s what she has to say about Feith:
Retired Air Force Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, now a James Madison University instructor, wrote that she was dismayed when the White House appointees entered her unit and “through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgated what were in fact falsehoods.” She added, “I was present at a staff meeting when Bill Luti called Marine general and former Chief of Central Command Anthony Zinni a ‘traitor’ because Zinni had publicly expressed reservations about the rush to war.”
Kwiatkowsi said the Pentagon clique “lied or prevaricated about Iraq” to build the case for an invasion. Writing in 2004, she said, “The public story line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses, and a war one year later that Americans do not really understand.”
Shrouded in scandals, Feith left government in August, 2005. In September, 2005, Senators Pat Roberts [R-KS] and Carl Levin [D-MI] each requested an investigation of the OSP by the Inspector General of the Department of Defense released yesterday [Executive Summary]. So, now we finally come to Douglas Feith’s interview with Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room yesterday. He claimed that his questioning the mindset of the C.I.A. was a "good thing." What’s he talking about? He claims with conviction that the C.I.A. was unable to conceptualize that the Iraqi Baathists and the Al Qaeda Jihadists could be in league with each other. He says his presentations were not intelligence briefings, they were criticism of the C.I.A. and that’s where he threw in his Martha Stewart-ism, "It’s a good thing." He presents the Pentagon O.S.P. as a group that legitimately questioned the C.I.A., rather than as an alternative intelligence agency that went around the C.I.A. It’s a ridiculous argument, but one he still presents with great fervor. If that weren’t enough, here’s what he has to say about the ocean of evidence that he was dead wrong [transcript from ThinkProgress]:
BLITZER: Are you ready to acknowledge there were no WMD? Are you ready to acknowledge there was no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda?
FEITH: We did not find WMD stockpiles. We found WMD programs. And the Duelfer report, as I’m sure you know, was very clear on what we found in the WMD area. Although we did not find the stockpiles, we found he had the facilities, he had the personnel, he had the intention. It wasn’t the way the CIA described.
BLITZER: What about on the al Qaeda connection?
FEITH: On the al Qaeda connection, George Tenet on October 7th, 2002, wrote an unclassified letter to the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee laying out the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.
BLITZER: So you believe there was a connection?
FEITH: I believe George Tenet.
BLITZER: But now you know that was false.
FEITH: No, I’ve never heard it was false.
BLITZER: To this day you believe he was working with al Qaeda?
FEITH: I believe that what George Tenet published in October of 2002 was the best information on the subject, and as far as I know — that is largely — I mean there may be — I’ve not been in the government for the last year and a half. There may be some more intelligence on that subject. I’m telling you from the time George Tenet published his findings on the Iraq/al Qaeda relationship, which was that they had a relationship for ten years and they talked about various things — bomb making and safe haven and other issues — that that was, the U.S. government’s best understanding of the subject. I never criticized that in public or in private.
This man is not only a fool and a liar, he is a traitor. He’s the real kind – passing and leaking classified documents, representing another government [Israel] while employed by ours, distorting and fabricating intelligence that got turned into policy, lying about his activities while part of a vital arm of our government. I can’t think of anything to say except for the Queen of Hearts line in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland: "Off with their heads!"
In case it doesn’t show. I’m trying to let go of this story. When the prosecution rested in the Libby Trial on Thursday, I was all settled into taking a political sabbatical for a few days. In fact, after listening to Ted Wells on Wednesday and Thursday, I considered even skipping the live-blog altogether. The man is too abrasive for my sensibilities. Then, on Thurday evening, here came the Inspector General’s Report, and I got caught up in it all. Feith has that kind of effect on some of us. So this post is an attempt to get it out of my system – my Feith-based Initiative…
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