What has the Pentagon's third man done wrong? Everything. Slate on Feith.

Douglas Feith

What has the Pentagon's third man done wrong? Everything.

By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Thursday, May 20, 2004, at 3:56 PM PT


Of all the revelations that have surfaced about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal so far, the least surprising is that Douglas Feith may be partly responsible. Not a single Iraq war screw-up has gone by without someone tagging Feith-who, as the Defense Department's undersecretary for policy, is the Pentagon's No. 3 civilian, after Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz-as the guy to blame. Feith, who ranks with Wolfowitz in purity of neoconservative fervor, has turned out to be Michael Dukakis in reverse: ideology without competence.

It's not that the 50-year-old Feith is at fault for everything that's gone wrong in Iraq. He's only tangentially related to the mystery of the missing weapons of mass destruction, for example. (Though it's a significant tangent: An anonymous "Pentagon insider" told the Washington Times last year that Feith was the person who urged the Bush administration to make Saddam's WMD the chief public rationale for going to war immediately.) Nor was it Feith who made the decision to commit fewer troops than the generals requested. (Though Feith did give the most honest explanation for the decision, saying last year that it "makes our military less usable" if hundreds of thousands of troops are needed to fight wars.) But if he isn't fully culpable for all these fiascos, he's still implicated in them somehow. He's a leading indicator, like a falling Dow-something that correlates with but does not cause disaster.

Start with Abu Ghraib. Feith's office was in charge of Iraq's military prisons, but that's not the only reason his name keeps turning up in newspaper reports about the scandal. It was Feith who devised the legal solution for getting around the Geneva Conventions' prohibition on physically or psychologically coercing prisoners of war into talking. As a Pentagon official in the 1980s, Feith had laid out the argument that terrorists didn't deserve protection under the Geneva Conventions. Once the war on terrorism started, all he had to do was implement it. And even more damning than his legal rule-making is Feith's reported reaction to complaints by military Judge Advocate General lawyers about the new, looser interrogation rules. "They said he had a dismissive, if not derisive, attitude toward the Geneva Conventions," Scott Horton, a lawyer who was approached by six outraged JAG officers last year, told the Chicago Tribune. "One of them said he calls it 'law in the service of terror.' "

more
http://slate.msn.com/id/2100899


Bad Feith.

he truly is bad to the core

they were brilliant, and they were fools

That being said, who now pays for the misdeeds that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith have brought upon this nation?

How can they be brought to justice? And, in a broader sense, exactly what would be justice for these people?

The neo-cons' ideas are horrible. Everything they do turns out to be a miserable failure. I just don't get why anyone considers them brilliant, or even very smart. Cheney, especially, I think is highly overrated.

for some of the time.

Empire by Dummies.

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

"And while the Pentagon's assumptions of an ecstatic, sweets-and-flowers-bearing populace that would welcome the occupiers as liberators may have been understandable in February 2003, Feith continued to let ideology rule his decisions long after the "major combat operations" ended. Last September, Knight Ridder reported that Paul Bremer's request for more than 220 employees for the occupation had yet to be approved. Guess who was to blame? "It is taking forever because Feith only wants true believers to get through the gate," a senior administration official said."

This ties with the threads about the CPA recruiting Young Republicans etc through the Heritage Foundation. What a bunch of jerkoffs.

Except they got the role of the OSP wrong.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/May2004/Lobe0520.htm

Here's some info on Feith, I hadn't realized that Karen Kwiatkowski was his deputy. If he as loathesome a creature as has been reported maybe that helped push her whistle blowing.

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Douglas_Feith

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=110&topic_id=80&mesg_id=80&page=

It's the beginning of the end for the neo-cons.