Douglas Feith is a tool, among other things. Last night on Sixty Minutes he attempted to spin a yarn so big, I thought the interviewer, Steve Kroft, was going to piss down both legs as he stared at Feith in amazement.
Feith attempted to spin the War in Iraq as a preemptive strike. No, I am not kidding..its in the link above either in the transcript or the video of the show. From Feith's own piehole:
"What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11. Our main goal was preventing the next attack." (emphasis mine)
Incredulous at this point, Kroft says Feith's logic stinks to high heaven and could be used to attack Iran, North Korea, Syria and countless other countries that talk a good game but haven't done anything to us on US soil. Then Feith drops this little turd:
"In an era where WMDs can put countries in a position to do an enormous amount of harm,” he tells Kroft, “the old of idea of having to wait until you actually see the country mobilizing for war doesn't make a lot of sense."
I guess it's safe to say at this point that Doug isn't a big fan of diplomacy and talking it out. Kroft then lets Doug know that the Idiot-in-Chief and others said the reason we were attacking Iraq was because of an imminent threat that they were going to use their WMD's on the U.S.
Feith actually has the nads to say at this point that he believes no one in the administration actually said that. Kroft, fully loaded with ammo at this point, starts ticking off various members of the BushCo cartel that parroted that line of thought: Rummy, Powell, and Bush himself.
Feith is promoting his new book; War and Decision. Kroft prefaces the interview by saying Feith defends much and apologizes for very little about the war in his book. That would be an understatement m'dear reader.
Feith is considered one of the architects of the Iraq war, along with Paul Wolfowitz. He was also the guy that was in charge of Iraq's military prisons, which means he was the head honcho for Abu-Ghraib. He has so much disdain for the Geneva Conventions that this Slate article quotes the following:
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.' "
Oh my, the GC isn't worth the paper it's printed on Doug? Lets move on..shall we? Doug was also in charge of the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Unit:
The group issued a report about connections between Iraq and al-Qaida that Rumsfeld had Feith deliver to CIA Director George Tenet in August 2002. This was reportedly the same report that Vice President Cheney recently called "your best source of information" on the links between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
Of course that report has been debunked to hell and back. Feith also denies taking part in the decision-making process that led to Bremer dismantling the Iraq Army. Bremer..to paraphrase, says Feith is full of shit on that point too. I would tend to think if your the head of the department tasked with rebuilding the post-war Iraq..you really would have a say in any and everything done in that regard.
The 60 Minutes interview will most likely cause you to clinch your teeth when Doug Feith is finished covering his ass and doing quite a bad job of it I might add. Kroft corrects him on quite a few points. If your a big enough sucker to buy his book to read his excuses for why the Iraq war went to shit..head on over to your nearest bookstore. I personally find Dougie Feith a liar and a warmongering fuckwit that ignored common sense issues and helped trash our Constitution while having a primo job in the Bush administration. To close, I think this quote from a recent HuffPo writeup sums it up best for me:
What's incredible is that only in the field of foreign policy can someone have so disastrous a record and be showered with medals, endowed chairs at prestigious think tanks, and even a professorship at Georgetown University's esteemed Walsh School of Foreign Service. It boggles the mind.
Yes, it surely does boggle my mind. The man should be tried under those very same Geneva Conventions.
Tags: Doug Feith
