Top War Profiteer Doug Feith Retires Wealthy

SAVE AS FAVORITE

VIEW FAVORITES

By Evelyn Pringle (about the author) Page 3 of 6 page(s)

opednews.com Permalink

Implementing The Iraq Profiteering Scheme

Feith had been pushing for the ouster of Saddam for years. In 1998, him and Richard Perle sent a letter to President Bill Clinton proposing that the US team up with Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress to get rid of Saddam. Clinton refused.

As we all know, Ahmed had strong support within the Pentagon. In fact, two of his staunchest supporters were Feith, and Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board.

Perle, an assistant defense secretary during the Reagan administration, was appointed by his old crony, Donald Rumsfeld, to lead the board in 2001. Its a well-known fact that the board exerts tremendous influence when it comes to war policies.

As soon as Bush took office, Perle, Feith and Ahmed Chalabi all started working diligently together to get the war in Iraq off the ground, with Ahmed providing bogus intelligence about WMDs and bragging about a secret network within Iraq which could take over running the country after the invasion.

"There was a close personal bond, too, between Chalabi and Wolfowitz and Perle, dating back many years," according to Seymour Hersh in the May 5, 2003 the New Yorker.

"Their relationship deepened after the Bush Administration took office, and Chalabi's ties extended to others in the Administration, including Rumsfeld; Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; and I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff," Hersh wrote.

"With the Pentagon's support, Chalabi's group worked to put defectors with compelling stories in touch with reporters in the United States and Europe," Hersh said, "The resulting articles had dramatic accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction or told of ties to terrorist groups. In some cases, these stories were disputed in analyses by the C.I.A." he noted.

Almost immediately after September 11th, "the I.N.C. began to publicize the stories of defectors who claimed that they had information connecting Iraq to the attacks, Hersh said.

For example, in a October 14, 2001, interview on PBS Frontline," Sabah Khodada, an Iraqi Army captain, said that the 9/11 attack was conducted by people who were trained by Saddam, and that Iraq had a program to instruct terrorists in the art of hijacking. Another defector, who was identified as a retired lieutenant general in the Iraqi intelligence service, said that in 2000 he witnessed Arab students being given lessons in hijacking on a Boeing 707 parked at an Iraqi training camp near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.

Feith then fed this type of INC data into a fabrication mill operating at top speed known as the Office of Special Plans and some of the information processed through the OSP was not even shared with official intelligence agencies. In many instances it was passed on to the National Security Council, Cheney, and Bush without having been vetted by anyone besides this group of nitwits.

And they had to know that much of the information was false. A former high-level intelligence official told Hersh that American Special Forces units had been sent into Iraq in mid-March 2003, before the start of the war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. They came up with nothing, the official told Hersh. Never found a single Scud.

A 46 page report, based on a 15-month investigation, titled, Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis of the Issue of an Iraq-al Qaeda Relationship, was released on October 21, 2004, which said, "There is ample evidence that the Bush Administration had a predisposition to overthrow Saddam Hussein before the 9/11 attacks."

The report accused Feith's office of compiling "selective reinterpretations of intelligence" that went beyond the views of American spy agencies in order to help make the case for an invasion of Iraq.

The report concluded that Feith and his staff were convinced that a relationship existed between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and that the office had advanced that perspective by trying to change the intelligence community's views and "by taking its interpretation straight to policymakers."

"That alleged relationship," the report said, "coupled with the assertion that Iraq possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), was the major argument presented by the Administration for invading Iraq."

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6