Yahoo! News/Reuters: Senate asks Pentagon to probe Feith role on Iraq

link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/iraq_usa_feith_dc;_ylt=A9G_RwVl2XFDLj8BDQdhr7sF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl



Tue Nov 8, 9:39 PM ET

The Pentagon's inspector general has been asked to investigate the prewar intelligence role of a planning office headed by former U.S. defense policy chief Douglas Feith, a main architect of the Iraq war, officials said on Tuesday.

The request was made by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a letter sent in August.

It said the Defense Department should determine whether Feith and his Office of Special Plans wielded excessive influence over intelligence that claimed Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The threat of such weapons, which have never been found in Iraq, was cited as a main justification for President George W. Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003.

MoJo was all over this almost two years ago....

<snip>

It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.

So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.

Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews‚ -- some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity‚ -- exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html

Gen. Tommy Franks on Doug Feith:

"the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth"

that reptilian bastard doing for a living now, I wonder? What death-dealing scams to bankrupt a country is he pulling, or has he gone totally underground with the help of his boss Big Dick Cheney?

When will we get around to Wolfie and Perle and the rest of the butchers? Why is Rumsfeld still in office? We have a LOT of work to do.

.....The request was made by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a letter sent in August.

this IG investigation is a Republican stalling tactic.
From the article:



The committe has the OSP sqarely in its sights, the OSP
has become uncooperative, and now the Republicans are
trying to punt the case over the the Inspector General.
The Democrats need to keep the heat on.

...The Pentagon's inspector general has been asked to investigate the prewar intelligence role of a planning office headed by former U.S. defense policy chief Douglas Feith, a main architect of the Iraq war, officials said on Tuesday.

The request was made by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a letter sent in August.

Feith, who left the Pentagon earlier this year, has also been blamed for overseeing what is widely considered to have been inadequate postwar planning in Iraq, which is now gripped by a bloody insurgency.

....

A Defense Department spokesman said it had not yet decided whether to undertake the investigation.

*those who recognize we went on faulty intell - but still can't accept that our govt would act in such bad faith as to do so through intentional deception* - ask: If it was just faulty intel, then why have all of the key players in charge been kept in place, promoted, or given medals? If it was an honest mistake - wouldn't one remove those who had been so inept? Leaves folks having to think about that point for awhile. Sad that we have to keep pointing out the obvious.

The important part of this is the link it can possibly bring into critical scrutiny between the Wilson/Yellowcake story and the misadventures of Team B.

http://foi.missouri.edu/polinfoprop/liefactory.html

excerpt:

Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews—some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity—exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.

Wasn't Feith wrapped up in that as well?

Too much going on...

That's pretty bad. Considering how much time he spent with bush.