{"id":932,"date":"2007-02-14T08:31:01","date_gmt":"2007-02-14T13:31:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2007\/02\/14\/morning-fretting\/"},"modified":"2007-02-14T10:15:29","modified_gmt":"2007-02-14T15:15:29","slug":"morning-fretting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2007\/02\/14\/morning-fretting\/","title":{"rendered":"morning fretting…"},"content":{"rendered":"
I woke up this morning fretting. There were two things on my mind. One was Iran – a residue from the must-read Vanity Fair<\/strong><\/font><\/a> article [see below<\/strong><\/a>]. But the other worry was from something Cathie Martin said in her testimony<\/strong><\/a> in the Libby Trial:<\/div>\n
\n
<\/div>\n

Fewer people paying attenion on Friday evening, and fewer people paying attention on Saturday was when it was reported. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I was worrying that they might have brought it off again – bringing out the IG Report on a Friday. I spent the weekend ranting about arch-fiend Douglas Feith<\/strong>, but I’m worried that he’ll get lost in the Libby Trial story and Iran build-up news [not to mention the frenzy over the death of that Playboy Bunny person].<\/div>\n

In a way, it’s a silly but understandable worry. So many stories have gotten lost in these last six years that I’m paranoid. The Douglas Feith story is bigger than Scooter Libby – even bigger than the Iran build-up – bigger because it exposes the whole neoconservative insanity, a prerequisite to any serious discussion of anything. Feith spent the weekend on television, arrogantly defending himself as a hero with his absurd Talking Point<\/strong><\/a>, fooling no one but the brain dead. Then I Googled "feith" and was comforted to see that he’s still in the news. I was glad to see Karen Kwiatkowski<\/strong> there, though I hope she’ll be on major news programs instead of buried on Lew Rockwell and I hope she’ll stick to the facts. She’s understandably angry. She blew the whistle<\/strong><\/a> and nobody listened.<\/p>\n

I particularly liked the article in The Nation by Robert Dreyfuss. He connects Feith and the current Iran Rhetoric with the botched, "Fool me twice…" Bushism. <\/p>\n

So, indulge me saying, never forget Feith<\/strong>, again, and again.<\/p>\n

\n
Feith-Libby Lies Exposed<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n

Bizarre as all this is, it is important to remember that because of these lies, America went to war against a country that had never attacked the United States, that had no weapons of mass destruction and that had no ties to Al Qaeda or 9\/11. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, along with 3,109 Americans. Not only that, but there is every reason to believe that the Administration is once again involved in fabricating intelligence to justify its increasingly belligerent stance toward Iran. While Senator Levin keeps one eye on the Feith-Libby lies of 2003, let’s hope he and the rest of Congress keep the other on what looks like additional baloney about Iran. As President Bush himself so eloquently put it: "Fool me once, shame on–shame on you. Fool me–you can’t get fooled again."<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

…<\/p>\n

\n

The War Pimp<\/strong><\/a> <\/p>\n

by Karen Kwiatkowski<\/div>\n

The DoD Inspector General, after over fourteen months of diligent and surely difficult investigation, has concluded that the Office of Special Plans, and Doug Feith as Under Secretary for Policy,<\/p>\n

\n
\n

…developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaida relationship which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence committee and… presented these to senior decision makers.<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote><\/div>\n

I’m happy to say it didn’t take me fourteen months to figure that out. I’m happy to say that it didn’t take most of us who worked in the Under Secretariat for Defense Policy, Near East and South Asia directorate fourteen months to figure it out. We saw the CIA and DIA intelligence, we understood the region, and we watched Doug Feith, Abe Shulsky, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Ahmad Chalabi, Bill Luti and a handful of others in and around the upper echelons of the Pentagon create a preferred alternate universe, and then foist it on an unsuspecting country.<\/font><\/div>\n
… <\/div>\n
Doug Feith and his ideological partners have whored out the American defense establishment, and if a few thousand soldiers and marines get beat up or even killed, well, at least the game goes on. For Feith and his friends, physical destruction of inconvenient states is a victimless crime, and a whole lot of fun to boot. So what if a few lies were told to make the deal. And are we really going to stop after we’ve come this far? <\/div>\n

And unlike prostitution, it wasn’t even illegal. It’s enough to have people saying, "There ought to be a law!"<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

If Feith’s protestations – that he was just innocently helping the CIA do a better job – fail to convince an increasingly disgusted public and a slowly awakening Congress, he will, like Scooter before him, begin to say, "I was set up!" I can’t wait to watch the next episode. <\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote><\/div>\n

\n

Update [10:04 AM]: Oh my Lord, then I read the Washington Post!<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

\n
Tough Questions We Were Right to Ask<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

By Douglas J. Feith<\/font><\/div>\n

Wednesday, February 14, 2007; Page A19<\/font><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Promoters of the "Bush Lied, People Died" line claim that the recent Pentagon inspector general’s report concerning my former office’s work on Iraq intelligence supports their cause. What the IG actually said is a different story.<\/p>\n

The IG, Thomas Gimble, focused on a single Pentagon briefing from 2002 — a critique of the CIA’s work on the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship. His report concluded that the work my office generated was entirely lawful and authorized, and that Sen. Carl Levin was wrong to allege that we misled Congress.<\/p>\n

Gimble made Levin happy, however, by calling the Pentagon briefing "inappropriate," a word the senator has whipped into a political lather. At issue is a simple but critical question: whether policy officials should be free to raise questions about CIA work. In Gimble’s opinion, apparently, the answer is no. I disagree.<\/div>\n

The CIA has a hard job. Some of its work has been good; some has been famously and disastrously bad, as everyone familiar with the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction fiasco knows. Intelligence is inherently sketchy and speculative — and historically often wrong. It is improved when policy officials freely probe and challenge it.<\/p>\n

In evaluating our policy toward Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001, my office realized that CIA analysts were suppressing some of their information. They excluded reports conflicting with their favored theory: that the secular Iraqi Baathist regime would not cooperate with al-Qaeda jihadists. (We now face a strategic alliance of jihadists and former Baathists in Iraq.) Pentagon officials did not buy that theory, and in 2002 they gave a briefing that reflected their skepticism. Their aim was not to enthrone a different theory, but to urge the CIA not to exclude any relevant information from what it provided to policymakers. Only four top-level government officials received the briefing: Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and (together) Stephen Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.<\/p>\n

blah, blah, blah… <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And I was worried about keeping him in the news [Wasn’t "tough questions" an early Bushism?]. The crazy son-of-a-bitch is going to do it all by himself!<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I woke up this morning fretting. There were two things on my mind. One was Iran – a residue from the must-read Vanity Fair article [see below]. But the other worry was from something Cathie Martin said in her testimony in the Libby Trial: Fewer people paying attenion on Friday evening, and fewer people paying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}