Gen. Tommy Franks once refereed to Doug Feith, the former undersecretary of defense under Rumsfeld, as the "stupidest fucking guy on the face of the earth." As head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, he was responsible for providing alternative interpretations of pre-war intelligence on Iraq to the Secretary of Defense and the Vice President.
As we of course now know, virtually every single one of his interpretations turned out to not just be wrong, but spectacularly wrong. So says the Pentagon Inspector General.
No surprise there, I suppose. But... the public release of this report has forced Feith to respond to the criticism. And you'll never guess....
An unclassified summary of the full document is scheduled for release today in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which Levin chairs. In that summary, a copy of which was obtained from another source by The Washington Post, the inspector general concluded that Feith's assessment in 2002 that Iraq and al-Qaeda had a "mature symbiotic relationship" was not fully supported by available intelligence but was nonetheless used by policymakers.
At the time of Feith's reporting, the CIA had concluded only that there was an "evolving" association, "based on sources of varying reliability."In a telephone interview yesterday, Feith emphasized the inspector general's conclusion that his actions, described in the report as "inappropriate," were not unlawful. "This was not 'alternative intelligence assessment,' " he said. "It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance.
Got that? I wrote it. I said it. I gave it to Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush for consideration. But just because I wrote it doesn't mean I agreed with it. After all, it was just a potential criticism, not an actual one.
Erm... OK... I guess it depends on what your definition of "presenting" is, now doesn't it?
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