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Yo
Carl Levin release the report into Doug Feith's activities that the Senate as a whole, or at least a whole committee of which, would have done if the Republican Party leadership thought such things as truth, the law, or good government should ever come before partisan gain. And, indeed, it's the report the Bush administration would have cooperated with if the Republican Party leadership thought such things as truth, the law, or good government should ever come before partisan gain. Laura Rozen offers highlights. I'll write more on this later.
October 22, 2004 | Permalink
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Comments
Frist? No, seriously, this is big stuff. Why, exactly, are more than a few doors being blown off the tight-knit Rebublican apparatus?
First Tenet, now this, next...what? There appear to be lot of leaks and un-helpful (to the GOP) nuggets trickling down these days, never mind Spitzer's newest offensive (which is, I expect, going to be huge, huge, huge).
I hope for (but do not expect) Colin Powell to resign before election day. That would be just about right for so many reasons.
We can all have our dreams.
Posted by: abjectfunk | Oct 22, 2004 12:27:11 AM
Interesting to me that this stuff was set up in the Pentagon, instead of in the NSC, as Ollie North was in the Reagan years. Was Condi smart, or not trusted, or was the previous experience learned from? Rozen asks whether Feith can claim executive privilege at all, being in the Pentagon.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Oct 22, 2004 12:36:20 AM
Nobody with a Harvard education should have to write so poorly.
Posted by: blah | Oct 22, 2004 12:58:49 AM
And in other news, the Cards win the pennant! Get me some toasted raviolis and a Bud!
Posted by: Kiril | Oct 22, 2004 2:04:11 AM
Having glanced through the report, I don't see much that's new in it. Levin draws from familiar media sources such as Woodward, Suskind, and Meet the Press to make his case. He also references many documents internal to the DOD, CIA, and others whose damning contents have found their way into various investigative reports recently that are fairly well known. What he does do is bring all the information together in a lawyerly way to illustrate in detail how the case for war was built by crafting false but believable conclusions by misstating existing intelligence. In the case of Zarqawi, the core intelligence from the CIA stated very explicity that the Iraqi government did NOT know that he had smuggled himself into Iraq and that he was likely using an alias.
Feith doctored that to read: "Iraq is harboring a known terrorist and therefore has terrorist connections" and passed it up.
From the conclusion of the report Levin writes:
"Life and death decisions are based on the accuracy of intelligence. When intelligence is
distorted or exaggerated to support the policies of an administration, it jeopardizes our nation’s
security and the lives of the men and women of our armed forces."
So obvious it's almost a truism yet it still comforts me to see it in print given the present insanity and the fact that the administration obviously holds a different point of view. I wonder if future generations will look on this and similar expressions from our time in a similar context as generations have read Cicero during the decline of Rome; important truths rendered pleasingly, yet unable to stop the march of untrammelled power and hubris.
Posted by: Windhorse | Oct 22, 2004 2:16:31 AM
Someone is running ads in Michigan asking people to call Sen. Levin's office. They want people to denounce his stand on the 9-11 bill because of his proposed immigration amendments. I doubt it will work, because of the large immigrant Arab community here in MI, but I'm curious why there is a crank up of the conservative calliope on this particular issue.
Posted by: anon | Oct 22, 2004 2:43:34 AM
One of Rumsfeld's ventures into phrase-making was "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
Feith evidently took it one step further, concluding that absence of evidence was evidence of presence . . .
Posted by: rea | Oct 22, 2004 7:06:34 AM
Waiting for SoCalJustice and David Heyman to come to Feith's defense...
Posted by: LKing | Oct 22, 2004 9:33:27 AM
>One of Rumsfeld's ventures into phrase-making was "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
This is true, but I suspect that Powell's dog-and-pony show at the UN suggested that they knew exactly where the WMDs supposedly were. If the weapons weren't where Powell said they were, what what Powell showing us?
Posted by: raj | Oct 22, 2004 9:42:04 AM
Rumsfeld invented that phrase?
Must've been back when he was SecDef in the '70s, since I've heard that expression all my life.
Posted by: Grumpy | Oct 22, 2004 10:41:03 AM
It's a tautology, Grumpy. Get used to it.
Posted by: raj | Oct 22, 2004 11:16:01 AM
I very much agree with Windhorse above regarding the lawyerly prose. The cold rationality is persuasive and devastating. Although, as we know, those among us existing outside the reality based community are exempt from such criticisms.
Also, there seems to be a typo in the conclusion on page 45: "Misleading or inaccurate statements about the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship made by senior Administration officials were not supported by IC analyses but more closely reflected the Feith policy office views. These assessments included, among others, allegations by the President that Iraq was an “ally” of Saddam Hussein . . ." I presume Levin meant to say "al-Queda" here rather than "Saddam Hussein."
Posted by: fnook | Oct 22, 2004 11:28:31 AM
What I find funny is Laura Rozen's complaint that Feith hasn't been more forthcoming with information. As if Feith should make it a priority to help Carl Levin complete his campaign contribution to John Kerry. Duh.
Posted by: Al | Oct 22, 2004 11:34:55 AM
It's a tautology, Grumpy. Get used to it.
No, it's not a tautology, it's bullshit. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Posted by: EH | Oct 22, 2004 11:41:05 AM
no, al, it's doug feith's job to work for the people of the united states, for whom he has performed so poorly that in a real responsiblity administration, he'd have been fired long ago. instead, he's allowed by our non-responsibility administration to continue to hide the truth....
Posted by: howard | Oct 22, 2004 12:03:55 PM
That's true, howard. Of course, it's also Carl Levin's job to work for the people of the United States, for whom he has performed so poorly. Yet Levin's Kerry campaign advertisement (er, Senate report) has nothing at all to do with working for the benefit of the American people, and everything to do with campaigning for his weak-on-terrorism Presidential candidate. So it's unsurprising that Doug Feith would not want to help with that.
Posted by: Al | Oct 22, 2004 12:22:14 PM
Sec. Powell showed us satellite picures of trucks and vans.
When I saw Powell's presentation, I assumed that there was on-the-ground intelligence to back up the interpretations that he was giving. There wasn't. Trucks and vans became weapons solely on the basis of Powell's pronouncements. An incredible (too late) performance.
I suppose the premise was that everything looks sinister from 100 miles up.
Posted by: Jeffrey Davis | Oct 22, 2004 12:46:21 PM
This report is false to the point of slander. Mr. Feith is too fucking stupid to bluff at penny-ante poker, much less forge a report.
Posted by: Tommy Franks | Oct 22, 2004 12:47:55 PM
...on-the-ground intelligence...
You forgot the audio tapes, Iraqi Republican Guards talking to each other. Remember: "Nerve agents." "Stop talking about it." "They are listening to us. Don't give any evidence that we have these horrible agents."
Lol.
Posted by: abb1 | Oct 22, 2004 1:12:11 PM
Actually, Al, Carl Levin does not work for the people of the united states. His job is to represent and advance the viewpoints of his Michigan constituents, and apparently he does so fine.
You may not like his votes or political positions, but this is rather different than a paid professional (so to speak) like doug feith living in a fantasy world and failng to respond appropriately to legitimate congressional oversight on behalf of all of us citizens.
Posted by: howard | Oct 22, 2004 3:52:34 PM
My favorite Doug Feith story comes from the 9-11 Commission's report, a footnote of which suggests that it was Doug Feith who in the week following 9/11/2001 put in a memorandum the suggestion that the U.S. bomb South America or Southeast Asia as substitutes for the target-poor Afghanistan.
Posted by: LKing | Oct 22, 2004 3:57:47 PM
I had a faint memory of the Feith/Operation Roasted Condor gem so I looked it up. Sure enough, LKing was right. Here's that quixotic bit of nonsense from Newsweek:
"Days after 9/11, a senior Pentagon official lamented the lack of good targets in Afghanistan and proposed instead U.S. military attacks in South America or Southeast Asia as "a surprise to the terrorists," according to a footnote in the recent 9/11 Commission Report. The unsigned top-secret memo, which the panel's report said appears to have been written by Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith, is one of several Pentagon documents uncovered by the commission which advance unorthodox ideas for the war on terror. The memo suggested "hitting targets outside the Middle East in the initial offensive" or a "non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq," the panel's report states. U.S. attacks in Latin America and Southeast Asia were portrayed as a way to catch the terrorists off guard when they were expecting an assault on Afghanistan."
It's interesting to note that the administration considered Iraq a "non-Al Qaeda target" right after 9/11. I wonder when they dialed up Reality with their prayer machine of wheels within wheels -- built according to the dimensions found in the Book of Enoch -- and changed Iraq to an al-Qaeda hangout.
Wheels within wheels. It's all ball bearings these days, c'mon guys.
Posted by: Windhorse | Oct 22, 2004 8:31:34 PM
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