Before the Invasion, There Was Feith (ROBERT SCHEER)

[laststeamtrain]

Before the Invasion, There Was Feith
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070213_before_the_invasion_there_was_feith/
Posted on Feb 13, 2007

By Robert Scheer

Someday, you are going to read a whole lot about the shenanigans of one Douglas J. Feith and an elaborate scheme to get the United States to invade Iraq. That is because Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., has been determined to get to the bottom of this sordid tale and is now, fortunately, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee and thereby empowered to get at the truth.

<snip>

The tale begins with Feith, who was appointed undersecretary of defense for policy in the Pentagon by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after Bush was installed in the White House in 2000 by the Supreme Court. Feith’s office manufactured an “Alternative Analysis on the Iraq-Al Qaeda Relationship,” which ignored the consensus of the intelligence community that the two natural enemies—one a secular Arab government, the other a fundamentalist terror group bent on destruction of same—were not, nor ever had been, working together, despite a shared enmity for the United States.

<snip>

The most glaring distortion was Feith’s indefensible reliance on a shaky, discredited report from a Czech intelligence agent who said 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had a meeting with a top Iraqi diplomat in Prague five months before Sept. 11, 2001. As the 9/11 commission reported, there was never any good evidence of such a meeting, yet Vice President Dick Cheney continued to assert it as true, long after the facts were known. Cheney even called Feith’s report the “best source of information” on the alleged relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida after it was leaked to the neoconservative Weekly Standard.

So was the White House in on this hustle? It is hard to imagine it wasn’t, because Feith was selected by Cheney and Rumsfeld to run the “alternative” intelligence operation precisely because they knew he was an inveterate hawk, long committed publicly to a rollback strategy that would ensure Israel’s security through regime change in the Arab world, beginning with Iraq.

That radical and dangerous notion, based on a deep hostility to the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts pursued by all previous presidents, had been clearly outlined by Feith in a 1996 report he co-wrote with Richard Perle and other prominent neoconservatives called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” issued by an Israeli think tank. The report spelled out a rosy scenario under which a new post-Saddam Iraq with a Shiite majority government would support a pro-Israel position.

<more>

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070213_before_the_invasion_there_was_feith/

[Contrite]

1. Sy Hersh reported on this almost four years ago

in The New Yorker...all about Rummy, Cambone and Feith and their creepy little OSP shenanigans on behalf of Cheney, Wolfie and the Chimp.

"The Gray Zone":

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/040524fa_fact?040524fa_fact

And that little S**T Feith was still propelling the propaganda with Leslie on CNN's Situation Room just last week, trying to pin the tail on Tenet.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/030512fa_fact

His classic "The Stovepipe" article from 10/03:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/031027fa_fact