I just watched Douglas Feith on NBC News [watch it here and pay particular attention to my Senator, Saxby Chambliss, one of Washington’s biggest ever boobs] and The Situation Room [Feith is still claiming that he was right about Al Qaeda/Iraq connections]. Reading Feith’s responses to the Inspector General’s Report today has been infuriating enough:
"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."
But watching him speak in person in that same arrogant way they all talked back in 2002-2003 made my blood literally boil. He was spouting that same PNAC, AEI, Mylroie-esque venom – slamming the C.I.A., preaching the Neoconservative Gospel unmodulated by the intervening years that have made that kind of talk ludicrous. Here‘s one of his slide shows from 2002 [the one claiming Mohammed Atta met with an Iraq official].
[Following the formula outlined by Cathie Martin in her Libby Trial testimony, this report was released on a Friday – ."Fewer people paying attenion on Friday evening, and fewer people paying attention on Saturday was when it was reported."]
Feith’s defense was that his presentation "was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance." I suppose the fact that Vice President Cheney went around using it as a fact doesn’t dissuade him:
Iraq, 9/11 Still Linked By Cheney
By Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler
Washington PostMonday 29 September 2003
In making the case for war against Iraq, Vice President Cheney has continued to suggest that an Iraqi intelligence agent met with a Sept. 11, 2001, hijacker five months before the attacks, even as the story was falling apart under scrutiny by the FBI, CIA and the foreign government that first made the allegation.
The alleged meeting in Prague between hijacker Mohamed Atta and Iraqi Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani was the single thread the administration has pointed to that might tie Iraq to the attacks. But as the Czech government distanced itself from its initial assertion and American investigators determined Atta was probably in the United States at the time of the meeting, other administration officials dropped the incident from their public statements about Iraq.
Not Cheney, who was the administration’s most vociferous advocate for going to war with Iraq. He brought up the connection between Atta and al-Ani again two weeks ago in an appearance on NBC’s "Meet the Press" in which he also suggested links between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.
Cheney described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." Neither the CIA nor the congressional joint inquiry that investigated the assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon found any evidence linking Iraq to the hijackers or the attacks. President Bush corrected Cheney’s statement several days later.
Cheney’s staff also waged a campaign to include the allegation in Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s speech to the United Nations in February in which he made the administration’s case for war against Iraq. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, pressed Powell’s speechwriters to include the Atta claim and other suspected links between Iraq and terrorism, according to senior and mid-level administration officials involved in crafting the speech.
…
Feith’s profile in Wikipedia is worth a read – he’s a neoconservative idealogogue through and through with strong ties to Israel and Zionism. From my perspective, he is at the center of one of our country’s darkest betrayals. He’s not someone to forget about now he’s gone. He’s the kind of person to bring to justice so we will never forget how destructive an unprincipled idealogogue can be – Harvard degree or not.
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