Bush's Inappropriate Invasion of Iraq

Bush's Inappropriate Invasion of Iraq
by Ahmed Amr

Get out your beltway dictionaries. It's time to translate Feith-based intelligence from Pentagonese to plain English. A long delayed three year internal Pentagon review has determined that Douglas Feith orchestrated the deliberate and systematic corruption of pre-war intelligence. As a consequence, the Pentagon's inspector general has rendered the verdict that Feith's conduct was 'inappropriate' but 'authorized' and 'legal.'
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Besides, who exactly authorized 'the expansion of the role and mission of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy' -- an expansion that gave Feith and his OSP crew a license to manufacture and disseminate lies to market a brutal conflict that never had to happen? Was it Paul Wolfowitz -- Feith's immediate supervisor? Or did Feith get his marching orders directly from Donald Rumsfeld -- his only other superior at the Department of Defense? More likely, the canard assembly line at the OSP was established on the strength of a White House edict. Only Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Bush were legally entitled to authorize Feith to set up and fund the OSP.

Let's be very clear. Cheney had no authority to order the Department of Defense to do anything without Bush's explicit approval. Of course, there remains the question of exactly how much power Cheney usurped from George Bush. If it turns out that the OSP was 'authorized' by Cheney -- the President of Vice and Torture -- then Feith's criminal activities were neither legal nor authorized.

Is it even plausible that Wolfowitz would give Feith a green light to tamper with intelligence without getting clearance from Rumsfeld? Does that explain the timing of Rumsfeld's resignation -- a few minutes after he realized that Senator Carl Levin would be the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee? It's worth remembering that it took an inquiry by Levin to force the OSP-Feith investigation.

When all was said and done, the whole Feith affair faded from the news very quickly and for very good reasons. The MSM lads will tell you that the public is uninterested in who corrupted intelligence. After all, Americans have their priorities and their attention was focused on Anna Nicole's early demise.

You can't really blame the MSM crowd for their reluctance to follow up on the Pentagon's report. Wasn't it the combined efforts of the OSP and the mass media barons that gave urgency to the task of bombing Iraq into the stone ages? How many young American soldiers went into battle in the firm belief that they were righteously avenging the slaughter of 9/11? Even senior officers were astounded when they failed to locate the phantom WMD stockpiles promised by Feith and his neo-con cabal.

The 'journalists' who toil for the military-industrial-infotainment complex aren't about to expose their role in the Feith affair. There is no arguing that the lords of the press played a pivotal role in disseminating the garbage produced by the OSP. Feith's mission could not have been accomplished without the active collaboration of the cabal of Judith Miller clones at the New York Times. At the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, no effort was spared in the quest to spread the WMD canards to all four corners of the republic.

Feith's deadly brew had to be force fed to the nation by the Murdoch-rats at FOX. This unilateral war of aggression was vigorously championed in Wolf Blitzer's 'war room' which has since been converted into the 'situation room.' Maybe the CNN folks fail to see the irony that we got ourselves into this 'situation' in large part because they surrendered their 'war room' to the neo-con cabal. The net result of this media juggernaut was the suppression of any dissent that challenged the pre-war talking points provided by the administration and reinforced by Feith's 'alternative intelligence.'

Not surprisingly, Bush didn't even bother to make a public statement about the Feith affair. And the MSM folks were kind enough not to bother him with pesky questions.