Little Dougie Feith comes out Swinging in WaPo against Dems and Gimble

[KoKo]

but it really comes off as a big whining. This is too disgusting...and Josh Marshall calls him a moron...more likely Feith is closer to "MORAN" as DU'ers know them....

---------------

Tough Questions We Were Right to Ask

By Douglas J. Feith
Wednesday, February 14, 2007; A19

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A 2004 Senate intelligence committee report praised the quality of the Pentagon's Iraq-al-Qaeda work -- the critical briefing and the related Pentagon-CIA dialogue. The policy officials "played by rules" and asked questions that "actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency's products," it said. Levin and Sen. Jay Rockefeller both endorsed that judgment.

more whine, whine, whine...at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/13/AR2007021301092_pf.html

[Jacobin]

1. I think Tommy Franks has Feith pegged:

"Doug Feith is the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth."


http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_05/003978.php

[whosinpower]

2. bottom line

Is that Feith cherry picked the raw intelligence to paint a picture that Iraq was a direct and growing threat. He did this because THEY WERE WHORING FOR WAR.

And--questioning what the CIA reports is one thing.....but what they did was for a specific purpose to whip up the winds of war regardless of what senior CIA analysts who have been doing this for years and years have been doing. The CIA got it right Mr Feith. The're "favoured theory" was right and as much as you critisize them and try to blame them--they were right and you were utterly totally completely wrong. There is blood on your hands sir.

[wtmusic]

3. Another public service "retiree" with too much opinion

and not enough smarts. Yuck.

[Norquist Nemesis]

4. Feith is exposing himself as a pure partisan ideologue

This isn't his first time around the block in the political arena either. His writing is in the same tone as Grover Norquist, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney (Lynne too!), and Karl Rove.

I wonder if Feith keeps in touch with Richard Perle.

[Yavin4]

5. I Don't Think That It's Too Smart To Keep Pointing Fingers At The CIA

They're still the CIA after all. It's just not too smart to start a personal war with them.

[Tin Man]

6. Feith is not in jeopardy. His protests are not for *his* sake, but for the sake of the Admin

It's indicative of the *real* depth of malfeasance within this Admin, and the breadth of the NeoCabal shaddow government, that Feith has suddenly returned to the public eye, trumpeting his OSP lies.

Feith is not in any legal jeopardy. He's not doing this "whirlwind of spin control" for *his* sake, but rather, for the sake of this NeoCabal masters remaining in power. It's up to Feith, the man at the center of the Pentagon Inspector General's critism of the OSP, to step-up to the plate, and foul-off pitches for his NeoCabal teammates.

That's how damaging the IG's report was. The NeoCabal *had* to drag Feith back from the shaddows of "spending more time with his family" to put out the fires. And like the disciple he's always been, Feith has been spinning lies like a spider on meth. In the last 4 days, Feith has been on every talking-head program known to man, and has now written this OpEd in the WaPo.

The NeoCabal is worried, very worried. The house of cards is in danger of collapse. And Feith is out there trying to prop it up.

[atommom]

7. He said much the same thing on NPR a few days ago.

It was even harder to take hearing it in his own whiny voice. x(

DOUGLAS FEITH: Well, what he's saying is wrong and unsupported. The criticism that is being directed now at my former office is because my office was trying to prevent an intelligence failure. We had people in the Pentagon who thought that the CIA's speculative assessments were not of top quality; they were not raising all the questions they should raise and considering all the information they should consider. And our people criticized the CIA. And they did not present an alternative intelligence analysis; they presented a criticism. And now, the inspector general is saying that criticizing the CIA was an intelligence activity that policy people should not have engaged in.

CHADWICK: That's not what he's saying. He's saying you briefed the president and the vice president, and you said that there was conclusive evidence that there was a meeting between the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraq spy in Prague. That was doubtful then; it's pretty much discredited now.

FEITH: No, that's absolutely not true. I mean, what you're saying – there are about a dozen factual errors in your question there. It's just not true. First of all, I didn't brief them. I mean, that's part of it. But there were some people from my office and people from elsewhere in the Pentagon who were challenging the CIA's assessment of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. And they were raising questions and they were not putting out their own conclusions and analysis. They were challenging the approach that the CIA took because they believed that the CIA had a theory that ideological opponents like secular Ba'athists in the Iraqi government and religious extremists in al Qaeda could not cooperate for strategic purposes. And the critics in the Pentagon of the CIA said that the CIA was filtering its own intelligence and ignoring its own intelligence that was inconsistent with the CIA's theory.

CHADWICK: What the inspector general's report says is that your office presented findings, which appeared to be based on a full reading of intelligence. And they were not based on a full reading of intelligence.

FEITH: That's simply not correct. And I don't believe that's what the inspector general report says. I mean, there's an enormous amount of loose talk about this, and vague and loose allegations. And it's really very difficult to refute stuff that is so thoroughly inaccurate. The point here is there was an intelligent, professional criticism made by policy people of intelligence – now let me just specify.

http://www.npr.org/about/press/2007/020907.feith.html

[Tin Man]

8. He's been everywhere. It's a whirlwind of spin. But why? Feith himself isn't in any jeopardy?

Why is Feith suddenly speaking out in every medium, spouting his old NeoCabal lies, so vocipherously? He's not in any personal peril. Who put him up to it - Who is he protecting???

[atommom]

9. I don't know, but he was a whirlwind of vitriol when I heard him.

Somebody must have lit a fire under his tail. :shrug:

[Tin Man]

11. Yep, his NeoCabal masters ordered him: "Dougie, hold your finger in this leaking dyke."

...that's what we're *really* seeing. It's not Dougie Feith the man, it's Dougie Feith the instrument of the NeoCabal - ordered to put his finger in dyke breached by the IG's testimony to Congress.

They're scared, very scared - the truth is coming out leaking in, and they've got to stop it before it becomes a torrent.

[ljm2002]

10. "famously and disastrously bad", indeed...

...Mr. Feith says: "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."

What he fails to note, however, is that the part that was famously and disastrously bad -- the part where the CIA supposedly claimed that Iraq had WMD -- was exactly the part that toed the Neocon line, as put forth by Feith et al.

These people have no shame, none.

[90-percent]

12. laws

Surely there's enough existent laws to put Dougie in prison for a few life times, isn't there?

That this mass murdering criminal gets to walk free is a perversion of justice.

-85% jimmy