FEITH: We took an extremely strongly pro-Geneva Convention position in the Pentagon. And what I said when I briefed Secretary Rumsfeld on this, and briefed the President on it, is we have troops all over the world. There is no country in the world that has a stronger interest in promoting respect for the Geneva Conventions than the United States, and there’s no institution of the U.S. government that has a stronger interest in that than the Pentagon. … [T]hey are a part of the law of the United States, they’re treaties in force, and I thought the Pentagon had an extremely strong interest in promoting respect for the Geneva Conventions.
If Feith had such respect for the Geneva Conventions, then why did he help the administration evade them? In his new book on the administration’s torture program, British international lawyer Phillippe Sands interviewed Feith and reported that Feith “took the steps to ensure that none of these detainees could rely on Geneva.” Sands told Vanity Fair that Feith’s argument against Geneva “prevailed,” as the President signed an order turning Guantanamo into a “Geneva-free zone.” Feith seemed unrepentant: "The Common Article 3 restrictions on torture or “outrages upon personal dignity” were gone. “This year I was really a player,”
Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory. I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,” he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”
I have repeatedly felt that this man, Doug Feith, is the most "prosecutable" person in Washington. He’s also seems to be one of the sickest. His contentiousness is legend – and his stories change radically depending on the interviewer. If the truth about his actions in the Defense Department are ever known, they’re not going to come from him.
That aside, there are four characters in this story whose actions need to be made public ASAP: Dick Cheney, David Addington, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith. And the most vulnerable is Douglas Feith, because he is constitutionally unable to keep his mouth shut, even if the stories that come out of it are as variable as the ripples in a stream. For starters, this quote needs to be explained, ‘We Took An Extremely Strong Pro-Geneva Convention Position In The Pentagon’. What can he possibly be talking about?
It’s almost as quixotic as his story that his briefings about ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein [that he personally leaked to the Weekly Standard] were an exercise in keeping the C.I.A. on their toes rather than something that he was pushing as true. If he weren’t pushing its truth, why did the Vice President say it for years, based on his briefings?
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