Before the Invasion, There Was Feith

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.

Last week, his focus led to the partial declassification of a report produced by the Pentagon's inspector general. Although its shocking revelations did not get the coverage they deserved - what with a jealous astronaut under arrest and the death of a certain voluptuous stripper/heiress - efforts such as Levin's eventually will uncover the full picture of why President Bush committed to a war costing tens of thousands of lives and an expected $1 trillion that served no valid national security purpose.

Good piece, you should only go read.

Shorter: Normally, CIA intel would go directly to the President, if we had one. Instead, the intel went to UnderSecDef Feith, appointed by Cheney and Rumsfeld for the specific task of "correcting" intel that didn't agree with what they wanted the Chimp to see in its 'Agency analyzed' aka 'objective' form.

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.

Yeah, that worked, huh? I'm getting sick and tired of these assholes putting Israel ahead of the United States.

More important, why did the president raise Feith's analysis over that of the government's lavishly funded intelligence agencies? That is the basic question, and one that truth-diggers such as Levin eventually may be able to answer.

I'll take a wild-assed guess that the Chimp/Cheney/Rumsfeld wanted 'plausible deniability' and to be able to blame the faulty, aka 'cooked', intel on the CIA, which they've done.

Now that the cat's little nose is sticking outta the bag preparatory to jumping out with claws extended to scratch the livin' crap out of 'em, Bush and Cheney are gonna blame it all on Feith.

I saw this somewhere the other day: look for Feith to be the "new John Dean". Thrown under the bus by the Nixon Gang, Dean clambered back up to a table in front of a Senate investigating committee and spilled the beans big time. Let's hope.

Get 'em, Senator Levin. They all need to answer for what they've done.