webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

Feith, D

---

see winged money ledeen

no merri

fabricate gulf2 plame intel:http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/sunk/2012/08/21/96209788-cebd-11e1-aa14-708bac2c7ee9_print.html

---

---

Trump's decision to upend his national security team at the behest of conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer is a five-alarm fire

A Trumpist fanatic attains real power

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 04/04/25 mma

President Donald Trump’s abrupt apparent removal of the general who oversaw U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency at the reported behest of the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, a notorious bigot and conspiracy theorist, is a five-alarm fire for national security and good governance. The move demonstrates that the only qualification for service in the administration is personal loyalty to the president as determined by his most zealous sycophants.

Top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees said on Thursday night that Gen. Timothy D. Haugh had been removed from his positions as director of the NSA and head of the military’s Cyber Command. According to The New York Times, “a U.S. official briefed on the matter said Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and outside adviser to President Trump, called for General Haugh’s removal during her Oval Office meeting on Thursday. Mr. Trump ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to fire General Haugh, the official said.”

Loomer subsequently appeared to take credit, writing on X that Haugh and his deputy had been “fired” because they were “disloyal to President Trump” and thanking the president “for being receptive to the vetting materials provided to you.” She gave no evidence of Haugh’s purported disloyalty in her post — nor any critique of his service in his positions — instead criticizing him as “a Biden appointee” who “had no place serving in the Trump admin given the fact that he was HAND PICKED by” former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley.

Haugh is not the only apparent casualty of Loomer’s efforts. His seeming removal comes amid a firestorm caused by the revelation that Hegseth had provided precise details about an imminent U.S. military strike in Yemen in a Signal messaging group of top Trump officials assembled by national security adviser Mike Waltz, a move experts said endangered the lives of U.S. service members.

Waltz and Hegseth still remain in their posts — but as that story continued to metastasize, Loomer met with Trump in the Oval Office and provided him “with opposition research on [National Security Council] staffers whom she views as neoconservatives or not sufficiently loyal to the president.” The White House purged at least six NSC staffers following that meeting.

Trump surrounds himself with and takes counsel from a litany of right-wing media figures because he appreciates their fervent public support, particularly though not exclusively on Fox News. Those individuals wield immense power over every aspect of governance despite their total lack of relevant qualifications or temperament.

Even among the MAGA movement’s constellation of grifters, con artists, bigots, and loons, Loomer shines brightly. Here’s what I wrote about her in September as her presence accompanying Trump on the campaign trail triggered concern even from some of his other close allies:

Loomer is a self-described “proud Islamophobe” who is “pro-white nationalism.” She has claimed there is a “genocide” of “native white populations,” which she says are “being replaced in this country by third-world invaders,” and accused “so many rich Jews” of having “a fixation on trying to destroy America.” She has accused the Biden administration of seeking to assassinate Trump; called for the execution of unnamed “Democrats who are guilty of treason”; said that “all of these communist secretaries of state who try to rig our elections” against Trump “belong in jail for election interference”; and shared a video which claimed “9/11 was an Inside Job!”

...

Loomer has in recent weeks described [then-Vice President Kamala] Harris, whose parents immigrated from India and Jamaica, as “a brain-dead bimbo who sucked so much c**k in order to get to the political position that she's in today,” said she “is NOT black and never has been,” said her election would ensure that “Ebonics will replace English as the language of our land,” and said that if she’s elected “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.”

Loomer is nonetheless unusually influential because Trump apparently appreciates her personal, fanatical loyalty. “I don’t really have much of a life, you know?” Loomer told The Washington Post last year. “So I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.”

She apparently has something now — enough influence to impose her own loyalty tests on high-ranking government officials and see them cashiered by the president (and, she claims, to help shape his foreign policy). And so the country turns on the whims of someone once described by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), herself no stranger to bigoted and unhinged conspiracy theories, as “mentally unstable and a documented liar” who “can not be trusted” and is “toxic and poisonous.”

If you had said in October that if Trump were elected he would end up firing the NSA director and purging the NSC on the advice of someone like Loomer, you’d have been accused of having a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. And yet here we are, careening up to worst-case scenarios before the president’s 100-day mark.

---

04/04/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

US Attorney Ed Martin compared January 6 rioters to Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.

After setting much of the global economy — and retirement accounts — on fire, taking a golf trip isn’t a great look for Trump.

President Donald Trump has reached the “peak of not giving a fuck,” one White House official told The Washington Post for a lengthy report on what went on behind the scenes leading up to the president’s massive tariff announcement this week.

Harmeet Dhillon, an election denier and legal adviser to Trump, will now lead the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice.

I ended up spending six hours walking a total of 19 miles through the six office buildings at the Capitol. I walked by every single elected official’s office to document exactly which of them fly these flags.

President Donald Trump’s abrupt apparent removal of the general who oversaw U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency at the reported behest of the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, a notorious bigot and conspiracy theorist, is a five-alarm fire for national security and good governance.

---

ggl 4 25

CNN

White House fires multiple administration officials after president meets with far-right activist Laura Loomer

The White House has fired multiple administration officials, including at least four National Security Council staffers, three sources...

.3 days ago

The Jerusalem Post

Trump fires national security officials, reportedly at urging of far Right Jew, Laura Loomer

Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist with ties to antisemites, urged Trump to fire “neocons.” Days later, multiple NSC officials...

.3 days ago

eKathimerini.com

Trump will put pressure on Ukraine, but not on Israel

Having served at the Pentagon as undersecretary of defense under Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith had played an active role in the “war on...

.Dec 14, 2024

Hindustan Times

Ricky Gill likely to be Trump’s top NSC India hand, David Feith for tech role

If appointed, both Ricky Gill and David Feith will report to Trump's national security advisor pick Michael Waltz.

.Jan 11, 2025

Slate

Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for fiascos.

The 50-year-old Feith is at fault for everything that's gone wrong in Iraq. He's only tangentially related to the mystery of the missing weapons of mass...

.May 20, 2004

Mondoweiss

Doug Feith Has the Best Reasons in the World to Be a Zionist, But Is Too Afraid to Own It

The whole point of Zionism is that Jews are unsafe in western lands. Feith has all the reason in the world to believe this, based on his family's experience in...

.Jun 22, 2008

The Free Press

Douglas Feith: Who Should Run Gaza After the War?

The question is: Who should lead in Gaza once Hamas is destroyed? Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has backed the idea of giving control to the Palestinian...

.Feb 13, 2024

Vox

12 years ago today, Donald Rumsfeld sent the greatest memo of all time

Today is Vox's first anniversary, but it is also the 12th anniversary of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sending what was...

.Apr 7, 2015

The Atlantic

What to Do When Your Boss Asks You to 'Solve Pakistan'

Rumsfeld wrote, “We need more coercive diplomacy with respect to Syria and Libya, and we need it fast. If they mess up Iraq, it will delay bringing our troops...

.Jan 31, 2018

Chicago Council on Global Affairs

Bibi Netanyahu and the US-Israel Relationship

Douglas J. Feith and Aaron David Miller join Deep Dish to discuss the future of US-Israel relations.

.Mar 7, 2019

---

ledeen sorta admits he had entities that had relations to other entities?

no lnx

who forged the papers upon which Bush based his infamous 16-word claim that Saddam was seeking uranium from Africa, and that Joseph Wilson debunked? Justin Raimondo reports a new (though not entirely unexpected) revelation in the case, in the context of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the retaliatory leaking of Wilson's wife's identity as a CIA operative.

Wikipedia's background on the origin of the forged documents:

By late 2003, the trail of the documents had been partially uncovered. They were obtained by a "security consultant" (and former agent of the precursor agency to SISMI, the SID), Rocco Martino, from Italian military intelligence (SISMI). An article in The Times (London) quoted Martino as having received the documents from a woman on the staff of the Niger embassy, after a meeting was arranged by a serving SISMI agent. ("Tracked down," by Nicholas Rufford and Nick Fielding, Sunday Times (London), Aug. 1, 2004.) Martino later recanted and said he had been misquoted, and that SISMI had not facilitated the meeting where he obtained the documents.

Martino, in turn, offered them to Italian journalist Elizabetta Burba. On instructions from her editor at Panorama, Burba offered them to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in October, 2002. [6]

It is as yet unknown how Italian intelligence came by the documents and why they were not given directly to the U.S. In 2005, Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, expressed the opinion that the documents had been produced in the United States and funneled through the Italians: "The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein ...." [7]

In an interview published April 7, 2005, Cannistraro was asked by Ian Masters what he would say if it was asserted that the source of the forgery was former National Security Council and State Department consultant Michael Ledeen. (Ledeen had also allegedly been a liaison between the American Intelligence Community and SISMI two decades earlier.) Cannistraro answered by saying: "you'd be very close." [8]

In an interview on July 26, 2005, Cannistraro's business partner and columnist for the "American Conservative" magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed to Scott Horton that the forgeries were produced by "a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy." When Horton said that must be Ledeen, he confirmed it, and added that the ex-CIA officers, "also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing." [9]

In a second interview with Horton, Giraldi elaborated to say that Ledeen and his former CIA friends worked with Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. "These people did it probably for a couple of reasons, but one of the reasons was that these people were involved, through the neoconservatives, with the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi and had a financial interest in cranking up the pressure against Saddam Hussein and potentially going to war with him."[10]

Now Justin Raimondo writes:

Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

Alan Wolf died about a year and a half ago of cancer. He served as chief of the CIA's Near East Division as well as the European Division, and was also CIA chief of station in Rome after Clarridge. According to my source, "he and Clarridge and Ledeen were all very close and also close to Chalabi." The former CIA officer says Wolf "was Clarridge's Agency godfather. Significantly, both Clarridge and Wolf also spent considerable time in the Africa division, so they both had the Africa and Rome connection and both were close to Ledeen, closing the loop."

(Ledeen and Clarridge links added)

This supports recent reports that Fitzgerald's investigation has widened considerably. UPDATE 10/24/05: UPI confirmation of story.

This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.

---

ref

https://www.upi.com/Defense-News/2005/10/24/Walkers-World-Bush-at-bay/96791130158620/?u3L=1

no lnx

DEFENSE NEWS OCT. 24, 2005 /

Walker's World: Bush at bay

By MARTIN WALKER, UPI Editor

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.

This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.

Fitzgerald's inquiry is expected to conclude this week and despite feverish speculation in Washington, there have been no leaks about his decision whether to issue indictments and against whom and on what charges.

Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.

The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.

Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

There can be few more serious charges against a government than going to war on false pretences, or having deliberately inflated or suppressed the evidence that justified the war.

And since no WMD were found in Iraq after the 2003 war, despite the evidence from the U.N. inspections of the 1990s that demonstrated that Saddam Hussein had initiated both a nuclear and a biological weapons program, the strongest plank in the Bush administration's case for war has crumbled beneath its feet.

The reply of both the Bush and Blair administrations was that they made their assertions about Iraq's WMD in good faith, and that other intelligence agencies like the French and German were equally mistaken in their belief that Iraq retained chemical weapons, along with the ambition and some of technological basis to restart the nuclear and biological programs.

It is this central issue of good faith that the CIA leak affair brings into question. The initial claims Iraq was seeking raw uranium in the west African state of Niger aroused the interest of vice-president Cheney, who asked for more investigation. At a meeting of CIA and other officials, a CIA officer working under cover in the office that dealt with nuclear proliferation, Valerie Plame, suggested her husband, James Wilson, a former ambassador to several African states, enjoyed good contacts in Niger and could make a preliminary inquiry. He did so, and returned concluding that the claims were untrue. In July 2003, he wrote an article for The New York Times making his mission -- and his disbelief -- public.

But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents were supposedly written.

Nonetheless, the forged documents appeared, on the face of it, to shore up the case for war, and to discredit Wilson. The origin of the forgeries is therefore of real importance, and any link between the forgeries and Bush administration aides would be highly damaging and almost certainly criminal.

The letterheads and official seals that appeared to authenticate the documents apparently came from a burglary at the Niger Embassy in Rome in 2001. At this point, the facts start dribbling away into conspiracy theories that involve membership of shadowy Masonic lodges, Iranian go-betweens, right-wing cabals inside Italian Intelligence and so on. It is not yet known how far Fitzgerald, in his two years of inquiries, has fished in these murky waters.

There is one line of inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea bargain with his prosecutor, Paul McNulty, and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their inquiries connected.

Where all this leads will not be clear until Fitzgerald breaks his silence, widely expected to occur this week when the term of his grand jury expires.

If Fitzgerald issues indictments, then the hounds that are currently baying across the blogosphere will leap into the mainstream media and whole affair, Iranian go-betweens and Rome burglaries included, will come into the mainstream of the mass media and network news where Mr. and Mrs. America can see it.

If Fitzgerald issues no indictments, the matter will not simply die away, in part because the press is now hotly engaged, after the new embarrassment of the Times over the imprisonment of the paper's Judith Miller. There is also an uncomfortable sense that the press had given the Bush administration too easy a ride after 9/11. And the Bush team is now on the ropes and its internal discipline breaking down, making it an easier target.

Then there is a separate Senate Select Intelligence Committee inquiry under way, and while the Republican chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas seems to be dragging his feet, the ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, is now under growing Democratic Party pressure to pursue this question of falsifying the case for war.

And last week, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, introduced a resolution to require the president and secretary of state to furnish to Congress documents relating to the so-called White House Iraq Group. Chief of staff Andrew Card formed the WHIG task force in August 2002 -- seven months before the invasion of Iraq, and Kucinich claims they were charged "with the mission of marketing a war in Iraq."

The group included: Rove, Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and Stephen Hadley (now Bush's national security adviser) and produced white papers that put into dramatic form the intelligence on Iraq's supposed nuclear threat. WHIG launched its media blitz in September 2002, six months before the war. Rice memorably spoke of the prospect of "a mushroom cloud," and Card revealingly explained why he chose September, saying "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

The marketing is over but the war goes on. The press is baying and the law closes in. The team of Bush loyalists in the White House is demoralized and braced for disaster.

ref 2

http://web.archive.org/web/20060615211748/http://**rightweb.irc-online**.org/profile/1261

michael A. Ledeen, who holds the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, objects to being called a conservative. Instead Ledeen, a regular contributor to National Review Online, prefers the term “democratic revolutionary.” What's more, Ledeen says that “most self-described leftists today are reactionaries, and have lost the right to describe themselves as people of the left.” 2

Ledeen prides himself on being a public intellectual who has over the past few decades been directly involved in shaping and implementing U.S. foreign policy. He is a prolific author who has written 15 books, including recent ones on terrorism, Tocqueville, and Machiavelli, who Ledeen often cites in explaining his views along with Leo Strauss, another leading influence on neoconservatives like himself. Rather than advocating a conservative foreign policy, Ledeen and other neoconservatives say they are committed to “democratic revolution.”

“Michael Ledeen is a Renaissance man in the tradition of Machiavelli,” said Ted Koppel.

Along with many other neoconservatives, Ledeen's main institutional affiliation is with the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank that has provided the Bush administration with at least 20 officials and continues to help shape the administration's foreign policy.

Karl Rove, when he served as Bush's policy analyst, regularly consulted with Ledeen on foreign policy issues. When the Washington Post published a list of the people whom Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's closest adviser, regularly consulted for advice outside the administration, foreign policy veterans were shocked when Michael Ledeen popped up as the only full-time international affairs analyst, wrote Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service. 3

“The two met after Bush's election,” the Post reported, quoting Ledeen about Rove's request that “any time you have a good idea, tell me.” “More than once, Ledeen has seen his ideas, faxed to Rove, become official policy or rhetoric,” noted the newspaper. “When I saw that, I couldn't believe it,” said one retired senior diplomat. “But then again, with this administration, it seemed frighteningly plausible.” 4

Other AEI associates that are busy advancing a neoconservative foreign policy agenda include: Thomas Donnelly, Nicholas Eberstadt, David Frum, Reuel Gerecht, Frederick Kagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, Joshua Muravchik, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, Danielle Pletka, Michael Rubin, Gary Schmitt, and Ben Wattenberg.

AEI lists Ledeen's areas of expertise as the following: American national character, leadership and the use of power, U.S. foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, Europe (Italy), Africa (Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe) and intelligence. In addition, Ledeen testifies in Congress on Iran policy and terrorism, and is frequently quoted by the media on terrorism and the Middle East. Ledeen also advises “multinational corporations in Europe, Africa, and the United States, and is a corporate director in America and Africa.” 5

Although by academic training he is not a Middle East expert, Ledeen is known largely for his statements about U.S. policy toward the region and for his own activism and involvement in regional affairs. He has been a major figure in such groups as the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (which focuses almost exclusively on U.S. military ties with Israel), U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon, and the now-defunct Coalition for Democracy in Iran, which he founded with Morris Amitay, former director of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Ledeen's most recent book, The War against the Terror Masters, pinpointed Iraq, Iran, and Syria as the leading “terror masters.”

In March 2006 Ledeen testified before the House Committee on International Relations and recommended a policy of regime change and revolution in Iran. Ledeen argued that the U.S. government has “yet to fight back” against the terror masters in Iran. The mullahs “have waged unholy war against us” since 1979, he said. “They created Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad, and they support most all the others, from Hamas and al-Qaidato the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command. Iran's proxies range from Shiites to Sunnis to Marxists, all cannon fodder for the overriding objective to dominate or destroy us.” 6

“That leaves us with three courses of action,” said Ledeen, “none of which is automatically exclusive of the others: sanctions, military strikes, and support for democratic revolution. I am opposed to sanctions, I am generally opposed to military strikes, and I fully endorse support for revolution.”

He recommended that Congress move to back the Iran Freedom Support Act “by more openly embracing a policy of regime change in Iran, and allocating an adequate budget to demonstrate our seriousness in this endeavor. I know some members would prefer to dance around the explicit declaration of regime change as the policy of this country, but anyone looking closely at the language and content of the Iran Freedom Support Act, and its close relative in the Senate, can clearly see that that is in fact the essence of the matter. You can't have freedom in Iran without bringing down the mullahs.”

“The first step in crafting a suitable policy toward Iran,” said Ledeen, “is to abandon the pretense that we can arrive at a negotiated settlement.” Instead, the U.S. government should support “revolution” against the Iranian regime. While arguing that Iran is rife with dissent, Ledeen has failed to make a convincing case that dissidents living in Iran would welcome U.S. aid.

Oftentimes, those who disagree with Ledeen's foreign policy assessments are labeled “appeasers.” Writing in 2003, Ledeen said that the “appeasers” in Congress and the State Department “don't want to know about Iran, because if they did, they would be driven to take actions that they do not want to take. They would have to support democratic revolution in Iran, and they prefer to schmooze with the mullahs.” Concluding his 2003 commentary in National Review Online, Ledeen wrote: “I guess some top official will have to die at the hands of (obviously) Iranian-supported terrorists before the Pentagon is permitted to work on the subject.” 7

Ledeen frequently urges Congress and the White House to move “faster, please” in pursuing the terror masters. In December 2005, Ledeen wrote: “Look in the mirror and say ‘they are at war with us, but we are not taking the war to them anywhere but Iraq. That's a sucker's game.' Then call the White House and say ‘faster, please.'” 8

Although Ledeen is frequently quoted by the media and has testified in Congress on Iran policy, he has dubious credentials as an Iran expert. “Michael Ledeen has never been to Iran; he speaks no Persian,” said Brown University Professor William Beeman, the author of a new book on U.S.-Iran relations. “He has minimal credibility in assessing the Iranian elections, or evaluating the political situation there.” 9

In a National Review Online commentary in January 2006, Ledeen wrote that the Republican leadership in Congress, namely Henry Hyde and Richard Lugar, was marching “in lockstep with Foggy Bottom and Langley.” 10 Over the past three decades, the neoconservatives together with the hawks have blamed the State Department and the CIA for underestimating the threats to U.S. national security and blocking a more interventionist U.S. foreign policy.

Not one for the niceties of diplomacy, Ledeen wrote: “Whenever I hear policymakers talk about the wonders of ‘stability,' I get the heebie-jeebies. That is for tired old Europeans and nervous Asians, not for us.” 11

Going “faster, please” is what Ledeen advocated at the onset of the Iraq invasion. “I think we're going to be obliged to fight a regional war, whether we want to or not,” said Ledeen. “As soon as we land in Iraq, we're going to face the whole terrorist network,” he said. “It may turn out to be a war to remake the world.” 12

Ledeen was the first executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a group established in the mid-1970s with the objective of promoting close strategic relations between the United States and Israel, especially through military ties. While doing consulting work for the Reagan administration, Ledeen bypassed the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv for a private meeting with Prime Minister Peres. According to congressional testimony by then-National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, Ledeen introduced the original Israeli proposal to trade arms for hostages that led to the Irangate scandal. Ledeen was also part of a secret National Security Council initiative directed by Elliott Abrams and Oliver North to aid the Nicaraguan contras by channeling U.S. arms through Israel to Iran and then rerouting the sales income to the contras. This was at a time when Congress expressly prohibited U.S. military aid to the contras.

Such notoriety may have inspired the Wall Street Journal in a front-page profile of Ledeen to describe him as “a man with an intense knowledge of 20 th century history, a deep commitment to democracy, and a willingness to be adventurous. This is a man who has helped shape American foreign policy at its highest levels.” JINSA proudly notes that in his few years with the Reagan administration “he carried out some of the most sensitive and dangerous missions in recent American history.” 13 Ledeen remains an advocate for dangerous missions.

In 1992 the Wall Street Journal article titled “Roles of Ex-Pentagon Officials at Jewish Group Show Clout of Cold-Warrior, Pro-Israel Network,” examined the role of JINSA and such key figures as Stephen Bryen, Richard Perle, Ledeen, and Richard Cheney—all of whom remain active in shaping the U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex. This “tight little circle illustrates the enduring network of Cold War conservatives and pro-Israel interests in Washington, DC.” 14

Ledeen has a colorful track record, which has produced substantial grist for the conspiracy mill: He was allegedly tied to the Italian P2 Masonic Lodge, a violent right-wing group that was involved in a number of terrorists attacks in Italy in the 1970s the 1980s; in the late 1970s, while P2 was doing its dirty work, Ledeen was working as a consultant to Italian intelligence on terrorism issues; as a consultant to the National Security Council in the 1980s, Ledeen acted as a go-between for Oliver North in the early stages of the Iran-Contra affair, working with the Israeli spy David Kimche to gain the release of U.S. hostages in Beirut through an Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar;

he helped promote the “Bulgarian Connection” theory that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt on the pope in 1981; and, more recently, the Sydney Morning Herald reported (August 8, 2003) that Ledeen worked with Pentagon staffers to redevelop the channel to arms dealer Ghorbanifar in support of resistance efforts in Iran.

Reported the Herald: “[Harold] Rhode recently acted as a liaison between [Douglas] Feith's office, which drafted much of the administration's post-Iraq planning, and Ahmed Chalabi, a former Iraqi exile groomed for leadership by the Pentagon. Mr. Rhode is a protégé of Michael Ledeen, who was a National Security Council consultant in the mid-1980s when he introduced Mr. Ghorbanifar to Oliver North, a NSC aide, and others in the opening stages of the Iran-Contra affair. It is understood Mr. Ledeen reopened the Ghorbanifar channel with Mr. Feith's staff.” 15

Not one to mince words, Ledeen urged the then-newly installed Bush administration (National Review Online, March 8, 2001) topurge the “environmental whackos, radical feminazos,”and “foreign-policy types on the National Security Council Staff and throughout State, CIA, and Defense, who are still trying to create Bill Clinton's legacy in the Middle East.”

Ledeen's books include: Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair (1988), Freedom Betrayed: How America Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away (1996), Machiavelli on Modern Leadership (1999), Tocqueville on American Character (2000), and The War Against the Terror Masters (2002). From his book The War against the Terror Masters: “The awesome power of a free society committed to a single mission is something [our enemies] cannot imagine. … Our unexpectedly quick and impressive victory in Afghanistan is a prelude to a much broader war, which will in all likelihood transform the Middle East for at least a generation, and reshape the politics of many older countries around the world.”

[sources ...]

ref 3 long mostly iran contra?

http://web.archive.org/web/20060221012010/http://www.parascope.com/articles/0297/walshdoc.htm

central am death squads?

==

https://www.alternet.org/how-blow-700-billion-and-lose-wars-guide-americas-exploding-defense-budget-and-military-failure

...[personal narr]  On the wall of the mess hall across the table from us was a 40-inch flat-screen TV.  Usually the TVs in the Army’s mess hall were turned to one of the sports networks like ESPN Classic. For some reason that morning, the one we were watching was showing C-Span broadcasting from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, where a roomful of suit-and-tie wearing D.C. swells had gathered to hear a talk by Douglas Feith, the deputy secretary of defense for policy.

Feith was one of the triumvirate of defense intellectuals who had already become known as the “architects of the Iraq war.” The other two were Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The U.S. invaded Iraq in March and took Baghdad in three weeks. Eight months later, the “architects” of the war were riding high. At the same moment we were sitting there in Tal Afar having breakfast, Feith was standing in front of this roomful of lobbyists, congressional staffers and defense industry hacks holding forth on the subject of “Transforming the U.S. Global Defense Posture.” Feith was rambling on, spewing macho military strategy-speak about “updating the types, locations, numbers and capabilities of our military forces and the nature of our alliances.” We had to get away from our “Cold War posture,” Feith was saying, when “U.S. forces deployed forward were defensive, tripwire units that were expected to fight near where they were based. The kind of forces used for that mission are not the agile, fast, lean forces we need for the future.”

The sergeant sitting next to me was covered in dried mud and dust. He had gone six weeks in Sinjar without a bath or hot food. Breakfast that morning was his first taste of civilization, and there was Feith on the TV telling him: “We no longer expect our forces to fight in place; rather, their purpose is to project power into theaters that may be distant from where they are based.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” the sergeant yelled at the man on the screen. Shaking his head in amazement, he asked me, “Sir, you got any idea who that asshole is?”

I told him he was Douglas Feith, one of the “architects” of the war who had sent him and the other soldiers over there to Iraq.

“Stupid motherfucker doesn’t know what the fuck he doesn’t know,” the sergeant said between bites.

“Realigning the U.S. posture will also help strengthen our alliances by tailoring the physical U.S. ‘footprint’ to suit local conditions. The goal is to reduce friction with host nations,” Feith intoned.

“Reduce friction my ass,” said one of the other soldiers at the table. “We been out there killing the motherfuckers!” He picked up a piece of toast covered with butter and jelly and threw it at the screen. “Shut the fuck up, you douchebag!” yelled another soldier. Soon the whole table was throwing eggs and toast and open containers of yogurt at the screen.

Feith was still talking: “We intend to increase combined training for expeditionary operations, for example, to encourage Allied participation in so-called ‘high-end’ U.S. exercises. For this deployability concept to work, U.S. forces must be able to move smoothly into, through, and out of host nations.”

“We been here for 10 fuckin’ months, you idiot,” one of the soldiers yelled.  “Tell me about into and out of this fuckin’ host nation! They’ll be sending our sorry asses back! You can count on it.”

By now, the television screen was covered in bits of egg and buttered toast and jelly. Feith finally reached his grand finish: “Whatever improvements in military effectiveness the actual posture decisions produce, they will serve our interests fully only if they also help sustain and strengthen our ties with our friends, allies and partners around the world. We are confident that they will.”

Sinjar, the town where the soldiers had been fighting for six weeks, would fall to ISIS control 10 years later. More than 5,000 Yazidi civilians were killed in the ISIS attack and hundreds of Yazidi women were taken as slaves. Tal Afar would be in and out of U.S. control over the next 10 years, until it too was taken by ISIS fighters. Same with Rabihya. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians would lose their lives. Hundreds of U.S. soldiers would be killed. So much for “posture decisions” and “military effectiveness.”

But that didn’t stop think tanks in Washington like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute and the American Enterprise Institute from lobbying for higher and higher defense budgets. (Douglas Feith is now “director for national security strategies” for the Hudson Institute.) This year, President Trump signed the largest defense budget in our history: $700 billion. The budget includes $13.7 billion for 90 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, which according to CNN are “in service and mission capable only 26 percent of the time.” Not a single F-35 jet has yet to see combat duty.

The budget will provide $4.5 billion for the construction of a new Ford class aircraft carrier, $450 million for three Littoral Combat Ships, $4 billion fortwo new guided missile destroyers,$5.5 billion fortwo new Virginia Class submarines, and tens of billions more for upgrades and repairs on various aircraft and naval vessels. Two of the guided missile destroyers already in service were involved in deadly collisions with cargo ships in the western Pacific last year. A Navy investigation revealed that for all of the hundreds of billions spent on defense, there was apparently not enough in the budget to provide for adequate training in standing watch and driving Navy combat ships.

All of billions spent on defense, and still the United States Army couldn’t interdict smuggling along the Iraq-Syria border. They couldn’t hold onto Sinjar, Tal Afar, Mosul or Rabihya.

You want to know what those soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division were using for weapons when I was there? The M-16 rifle. The 7.62 mm machine gun. The 81 mm mortar. The 105 mm Howitzer. All weapons the U.S. Army had fought with in Vietnam, 35 years earlier. You want to know what they’re still fighting with overseas? Those same old weapons.

You want to know what wasn’t being used over there near the Iraq-Syria border? Any of the fancy Navy ships or F-22 or F-35 fighters.

We’ve still got exhausted, dusty, hungry sergeants and corporals and privates over there in Iraq. If they’ve got C-Span on the TVs in the mess halls, they’re still listening to defense intellectuals like Douglas Feith giving speeches at those think tanks in Washington, which are still holding symposiums. They’re still talking about our “strategic footprint,” and “pursuing peace through strength” and “offshore balancing” and how “the strength of the unilateral pre-eminence vision is that it appears to provide an opportunity to reassert U.S. leadership and stave off risks for U.S. security in a rebalancing world.” This from Gordon Adams, a “distinguished fellow” at the Stimson Center in Washington, who wrote something called “U.S. Global Engagement and the Military” for the Foreign Policy Association.

Not billions, not tens of billions, not hundreds of billions. Trillions of dollars spent.

Fifteen years in Iraq. Seventeen years in Afghanistan. There is no end in sight.

==

torture spain war crime

**https://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/2008/07/feith_in_the_system.html**

==

huffpo 2011 top 7 underempl bush admin

Feith headed the Wolfowitz-created "Office of Special Plans," which was devised to concoct a non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Such a link would strike anyone with knowledge of Arab affairs as absurd; however, just as with prospective US occupation officials who were asked for their views on abortion as part of the job interview process, Feith's experience with the region was limited. Feith later worked at Georgetown University, but his contract was not renewed. Today he is a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a third-rate think tank.

==

When President Bush announced “Mission Accomplished,” and the end of the war in May 2003, he also said we would help the citizens of Iraq rebuild their country. “Now that the dictator’s gone,” he stated, “we and our coalition partners are helping Iraqis to lay the foundations of a free economy.”

Apparently he was referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority that took up residence in Saddam’s luxurious palace in May 2003, with the newly appointed King, Paul Bremer. The CPA was granted the authority to award reconstruction contracts in Iraq and it used that authority to implement what will go down in the history books as the most blatant war profiteering scheme of all time.

In large part, the masterminds of the reconstruction disaster that would occur after the CPA took over Iraq were Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and Undersecretary of Defense, Douglas Feith.

But to ensure control of the contracting process on the ground in Iraq, Bush filled the top slots of the CPA with the administration cronies. For instance,a friend of Cheney’s, Peter McPherson, took a leave of absence as president of Michigan State University to serve as Bremer’s economic deputy.

The leader of the CPA’s private development sector was Thomas Foley, an old college classmate of Bush, who served as finance chairman for his Presidential campaign in Connecticut and also raised more than $100,000 for Bush.

Relatives of the administration were also given jobs, such as Ari Fleischer’s brother Michael, and Simone Ledeen, the daughter of Michael Ledeen. Cheney’s daughter Liz, also did a short stint. However, it should be noted that none of them lounged around for too long in what soon became a hellhole in Iraq.

On May 16, 2003, the CPA issued its first regulation and described its authority in no uncertain terms stating:

“The CPA is vested with all executive, legislative, and judicial authority necessary to achieve its objectives, to be exercised under relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions, including resolution 1483 (2003), and the laws and usages of war. This authority shall be exercised by the CPA Administrator.”

With one swipe of the pen, Bremer granted himself the authority to run the government ministries, appoint Iraqi officials and award contracts for reconstruction. Next he fired 500,000 Iraqis, most of them soldiers, but pink slips also went out to many doctors, nurses, teachers and other public employees as well.

For the most part, the CPA financed its activities with billions of dollars that belonged to the Iraqis. On May 22, 2003, a UN Security Council passed a resolution that directed the proceeds from Iraqi oil to be placed in a Development Fund for Iraq, and the CPA was granted authority to control the fund and decide which profiteers would get contracts.

During the year that Bremer controlled the purse strings, the Iraqi Development Fund received $20.2 billion, including $8.1 billion from the UN’s oil-for-food program, $10.8 billion from Iraqi oil, and the rest from repatriated funds, vested assets and donations.

The CPA accounting system was cash and carry and a steady stream of cash was flown into Bagdad from theUS. Inspector General, Stuart Bowen later said that he knew of one $2 billion flight.

A report released by the House Government Reform Committee in February 2007, shows that in the 13 months that Bremer ruled, from May 2003 to June 2004, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York shipped nearly $12 billion in a cash to Iraq.

One can only imagine the Bank service charges associated with these shipments because to accomplish this feat, according to theDemocratic chairman of the Reform Committee, Henry Waxman, the cash weighed 363 tons and the Bank had to count and pack 281 million individual bills, including more than 107 million $100 bills, and then load them onto wooden pallets to be shipped to Bagdad on C-130 cargo planes.

Inspector Bowen later said that he determined that some of this cash went to pay salaries for thousands of “ghost employees” and Iraqi civil servants who did not exist.

Within a few months of the CPA’s arrival in Iraq reports of corruption in the contracting process began appearing in the media. A British adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council told the BBC that officials in the CPA were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for contracts.

Reports of flat out-fraud remained steady throughout Bremer’s reign in Iraq. One audit showed that the CPA Ministry of Finance could not provide documentation for about $17 million spent on employee salaries in February 2004, and a CPA Advisor to the Ministry of the Interior said the Ministry was paid for 8,602 guards but only 602 could be verified.

A CPA advisor to the Ministry of Finance was so concerned about payroll corruption that he submitted a formal complaint that stated in part: “Of the 1.6 million government employees currently on payroll, credible estimates put the number of ghost workers at somewhere between 250,000-300,000 employees.”

An October 2004, audit performed for the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, created by the UN to monitor the spending of Iraqi money, found one case where a payment of $2.6 million was authorized by a CPA senior adviser to the Ministry of Oil, and auditors were unable to obtain an underlying contract or any evidence that the services had been rendered.

The auditors in this group found 37 cases where files could not be located for contracts worth $185 million all total. In another 52 cases, there was no record that goods had been received for a total of $87.9 million.

People on the ground in Iraq said that doing business with the CPA was reminiscent of the Wild West. Former CPA employees told a congressional committee that sackfuls of cash were tossed around like footballs. Franklin Willis, showed pictures of himself and others holding up bundles of $100 notes totaling $2 million, which he said was used to pay the contractor Custer Battles. “We told them to come in and bring a bag,” Willis said.

He also testified that millions of dollars in $100 bills were stored in the basement of the CPA offices and distributed to favored contractors with little accounting discipline. For instance, in the year that the CPA ruled, Custer was awarded contracts worth more than $100 million.

Two former Custer employees ended up filing a lawsuit under the Federal False Claims Act, saying Custer had swindled $50 million from the CPA with scams like double-billing for salaries and repainting the forklifts found at the Baghdad airport and then leasing them back to the US government.

The employees said the CPA paid the Custer $15 million to provide security for Iraq’s civilian airline, when no services were needed because the airline was grounded during the time covered by the contract.

These employees said they kept informing the CPA about Custer’s fraudulent conduct for more than a year and when they asked why the firm continued to get contracts, they were told: “Battles is very active in the Republican party, and speaks to individuals he knows in the Whitehouse almost daily.”

In June 2004, the Government Accounting Office estimated that more than $1 billion in had been wasted due to illegal overcharges by contractors since the war began. A later audit by the Iraqi government found that as much as $1.27 billion was lost to accounting irregularities between June 2004 and February 2005.

Inspector Bowen cited two examples of poor oversight in a November 3, 2005 interview on National Public Radio where $28 million was paid to build 5 power plants and $1.8 million was paid to rebuild a library, but the work was never performed and the money

“simply disappeared,” he said.

A recent report by Bowen saysDynCorpwas paid $43.8 million for a residential camp for police training personnel and has been empty for months and that the company may also have billed $18 million in other unjustified costs.

About $4.2 million, he says, was improperly spent on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-size pool and an additional $36.4 million in spending for weapons such as armored vehicles, body armor and communications equipment that cannot be accounted for.

Not surprisingly, Cheney’s Halliburton remained the top profiteer under Bremer’s rule. A July 23, 2004, audit conducted by Bowen, showed the company had received 60% of all contracts paid for with Iraq money, including 5 no-bid contracts worth $222 million, $325 million, $180 million, and the last 2 together totaled $194 million for the last two. In comparison, the audit showed that the CPA awarded only 2% of the reconstruction contracts to Iraqi companies.

In one example of blatant fraud, an audit found that Halliburton was charging for more than 41,000 meals a day for soldiers when only about 14,000 were served.

By the fall of 2003, the country was realizing that the rational for war was based on lies and that the only ones drawing any benefits were the profiteers. So when Bush asked Congress for another $20 billion for the CPA, Bremer was summoned to Washington to explain where all the money was going and of course he testified in full stonewall mode.

Before the Appropriations Committee on September 22, 2003, Bremer said the CPA had detailed records of all its receipts and outlays that could be audited by Congress. But when he testified before the Armed Services Committee 3 days later he said the Office of Management and Budget was responsible for maintaining the CPA records and that Congress would have to go to the White House to access the records.

That arrogant assertion went over like a lead balloon with many members of Congress. Senator Robert Byrd said he was outraged over the inability to monitor CPA spending. “There is no reason why any arm of the executive branch charged with making such significant spending decisions,” he said, “should not be working directly with Congress.”

“When we’re talking about handing over another $20 billion to the CPA,” he said, “there is a real need for Congress to confirm that the CPA has its finances in order and that it is managing the taxpayer’s money responsibly.”

“We don’t even know how much of the $20 billion,” Byrd said, “will flow to government contractors in Iraq.”

“Whatever the amount is,” he noted, “we know that the size and scope of the profits being made will be enormous.”

“Former Bush Administration officials,” he warned fellow Senators, “are even setting up consulting firms to act as middlemen for contractors hoping to take part in the bonanza.”

“Are we turning the U.S. Treasury into a grab bag for favorite campaign contributors to be financed at taxpayer expense?” he asked.

The answer was yes, and what a grab bag it was. Media reports revealed that Bush’s ex-campaign manager and Feith’s former law partner had set up consulting firms to profit off the war by lining up contracts for clients through their partners in crime within the CPA.

Other reports revealed that contracts worth $407 were awarded to a firm called Nour that was formed less than 2 months after the war began. The names linked to the profits from Nour, among many others, included former Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, Ahmad Chalabi via a $2 million kickback, his nephew Salam Chalabi as the attorney handling the deal, and the money trail even led to the First Brothers, Marvin and Jeb Bush.

But come to find out, Doug Feith the ringleader on the ground in Washington, had awarded a batch of no-bid contracts to a favored company the month before the war began for the purpose of controlling the media in post-war Iraq.

In October 2003, the Center for Public Integrity obtained copies of 7 contracts awarded to the San Diego-based Science Applications.The total value of the contracts was redacted but the Center was able to determine that they were all awarded in February 2003, and called for the work to be directed by Feith.

However, the Center’s most stunning discovery was that when the contracts were awarded, Feith’s top deputy at the time, Christopher “Ryan” Henry, had been a senior vice president at SAIC until October 2002.

In addition, one of SAIC’s board members was Army General, Wayne Downing, who ran counterterrorism in the Bush administration for almost a year after 9/11, and had even went to the CIA with Cheney to discuss intelligence on Iraq. Downing had also served as an advisor to Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, and was well-known advocate for a war against Saddam.

Some of the SAIC contracts required that specific persons referred to as “executive management consultants” be hired and the pay range listed went as high as $209 and $273 per hour. The Center said congressional sources estimated the value of the media contract as $38 million for the first year and as high $90 million in 2004.

The SAIC had no special expertise to justify the award of these contracts. One company executive, quoted in the media, said the firm’s only credential for setting up an independent media, supposedly modeled after the BBC, was military work in “informational warfare”-signal jamming, “perception management,” and the like.

Under these contracts, the Iraq Media Network (IMN) was established and journalist, Mark North, who covered the Iraq invasion for National Public Radio, was hired to train Iraqi journalists to report for the IMN.

In one of the many Congressional hearings, North testified about the control of the IMN by the CPA and said CPA officials regularly directed and censored the activities of the news station and provided “a laundry list of CPA activities” to cover in the news reports instead of stories about security or the lack of electricity and jobs

While testifying, he also described the CPA’s shabby treatment of Iraqi employees and its refusal to pay their wages. “For the first two months,” North said, “the local staff of about 200 journalists and technicians were not paid their salaries.”

When the staffers went on strike in attempt to get paid, he said, the CPA told the Iraqis to get back to work or the US Army would remove them from the studios.

All total, the CPA had control of Iraqi money for one year between June 2003 and June 2004, but unfortunately no auditors arrived to take a look at the agency’s spending until April 2004, two months before the CPA’s rule was scheduled to end.

And as so often happens when it comes to giving solid advice or warnings, the senior Senator from Virginia was absolutely right. It was far too late for audits, because the CPA and its gang of profiteers had already robbed the Iraqis blind.

The favored companies enjoyed a fraud-free-all. For instance, Halliburton said it had lost over $60 million worth of government property including trucks, office furniture and computers. Inspector Bowen reported that 6,975 items valued at $61.1 million were lost, and in June 2005, the Defense Contract Audit Agency reported that the Halliburton had overcharged or presented questionable bills for close to $1.5 billion.

In the end, Bowen’s audit concluded that “the CPA’s internal controls for approximately $8.8 billion in DFI funds disbursed to Iraqi ministries through the national budget process failed to provide sufficient accountability for the use of those funds.”

As part of his new book, Fuel on Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, Greg Muttitt discloses the damning information he obtained under the Freedom on Information Act. The two whistleblowing Pentagon documents marked SECRET/NOFORN draw a vivid picture of Energy Infrastructure Planning Group’s role in 2002 as the Bush administration was contemplating occupying Iraq. In 2002, the EIPG was established by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, to plan how to run the Iraqi oil industry under the Coalition Provisional Authority, ultimately inclined to encourage private sector involvement. Much of what is laid out in the documents, and subsequently discussed in Fuel on Fire is about the EIPG’s long-term contracts with Halliburton, of which Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of at the time??, that gave them controlling priority over Iraqi oil if it were to be overtaken by the U.S. Other incriminatory aspects of the released documents depict how under EIPG’s suggestion, the Bush administration denied the media’s questions and rumors about Big Oil being a motive or determining factor in sending troops to Iraq, and how there was an overall disregard for Iraqi civilian welfare throughout this process.

Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Funds pinpointed a number of accounting weaknesses that put “billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of waste and misappropriation” in the largest reconstruction project of its kind in U.S. history. The report concluded the precise amount lost to fraud and waste can never be known.

http://projectcensored.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e8526bc09be7b03c98231efd7&id=ad18cfdfc8&e=087818defe

Title: Secret Pentagon Docs Reveal Pre-War Plans to Get Big Oil into Iraq

Publication: Institute for Public Accuracy, July 17, 2012

:{http://www.accuracy.org/release/secret-pentagon-docs-reveal-pre-war-plans-to-get-big-oil-into-iraq/:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background-color:transparent"):}:

:{“Fuel on the Fire”: Author Greg Muttitt on Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, Arab SpringSource: Democracy Now, July 16, 2012

}:URL: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/7/16/fuel_on_the_fire_author_greg

Researcher: Jennifer Garza. Sonoma State University


Faculty Evaluator: Barbara Widhalm, SSU Professor Environmental Studies and Planning 

Similar Posts:

===

Douglas Jay Feith served as the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the third ranking civilian position at the Pentagon, from July 2001 until his resignation effective August 8, 2005. [[1]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_J._Feith "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_J._Feith")

Feith, a staunch neo-conservative, previously served on the White House National Security staff under Richard Allen during Ronald Reagan's first term in office. He was dismissed when Judge William Clark replaced Allen. Allegations of improperly handling classified materials were made but Feith was not prosecuted. During Reagan's second term in office, Feith was part of Richard N. Perle's Pentagon team.

Contents[hide]

Controversial Tenure as Undersecretary of Defense

Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group

Shortly after the events of September 11, 2001, Feith created the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (CPEG), which was disbanded in February 2004. In April 2004, the "Group" was under investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as to whether it "exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq to justify the war." [2][3]

Attempts to Link Iraq with Al Queda

In August 2002, Feith and DIA analyst Chris Carney discussed Iraq's alleged ties to al-Qaeda to the CIA. CIA analysts immediately recognized that Feith's allegations came from discredited sources. The information will nevertheless be included in speeches by George W. Bush and in CIA director George J. Tenet's Congressional testimony. Feith distributed a classified memo to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence based on this information, and the memo was later leaked to the Weekly Standard, a neoconservative magazine.

Called for Regime Change in Iraq Five Years Before 9/11 Attack

Douglas Feith, along with Richard Perle and other noted neo-cons, called for the removal of Saddam Hussein in a 1996 round table report A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. [4] The removal was considered a means for foiling Syria's regional ambitions.

This report was prepared more that five years before the attack on the World Trade Center. The report describes regime change in Iraq as an important Israeli strategic objective.

For more information, see Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.

Allegations of Leaking Classified Material

The title of Laura Rozen's May 18, 2004, The American Prospect Online article states the case clearly in "Ye of Little Feith. Why one of Doug Feith's underlings thinks he might go to jail."

"'He was very arrogant,' Karen Kwiatkowski, Feith's former deputy, says, describing what it was like to work with him. 'He doesn't utilize a wide variety of inputs. He seeks information that confirms what he already thinks. And he may go to jail for leaking classified information to The Weekly Standard.' (As she explains, an article appeared in The Weekly Standard that included a leaked memo written by Feith alleging ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.)"It seems unlikely that Feith will face time for the leaked memo. But he may well be forced to look for a new job soon. As he knows all too well, regime change isn't pretty."

WMDs as the principal rationale for the war in Iraq

Feith and Paul Wolfowitz "are blamed for persuading President Bush that an invasion would be relatively easy."—Julian Borger, *Guardian Unlimited* (UK), May 20, 2004.

Controversial polices regarding Iraq's military prisons

Urged Bush administration to abandon the Geneva Conventions

Creation of Office of Special Plans

A supplementary annex of the committee's review of the intelligence leading to war in Iraq says about Feith: A Senior Pentagon policy maker created an unofficial "Iraqi intelligence cell" in the summer of 2002 to circumvent the CIA and secretly brief the White House on links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'eda. [5]

Relationship with Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi

A History of Internationalism

Turkey

In 1989, Feith registered International Advisors, Inc. (IAI) as a foreign agent representing the government of Turkey. The brainchild of Richard N. Perle, IAI's stated purpose was to "promote the objective of U.S.-Turkey defense industrial cooperation."

Douglas Feith was not only the CEO of IAI but also its only stockholder. Feith earned $60,000 per year and his law firm, Feith and Zell, was the recipient from IAI of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In 1992, Feith joined with Perle and other neo-cons opposing President George H.W. Bush's stern policy on Israel in forming the Committee on U.S. Interests in the Middle East.

Bosnia

Feith and Perle reportedly teamed up once again as consultants for Bosnia. They both worked for and advised the Bosnians during the Dayton peace talks. They were not, however, registered then as foreign agents with the U.S. Department of Justice.

Above paragraphs from the Arab American Institute's *Washington Watch*.

Background

"Doug Feith was most recently Managing Attorney with Feith and Zell, P.C., in Washington, D.C. He served from 1984 to 1986 as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy and was Special Counsel to Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard N. Perle from 1982 to 1984. Doug is a graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center." [6]

Feith has supported lobbying efforts aimed at persuading the United States to drop out of treaties and arms control agreements. Wrote one journalist in The Nation, “Largely ignored or derided at the time, a 1995 [Center for Security Policy (CSP)] memo co-written by Douglas Feith holding that the United States should withdraw from the ABM [antiballistic missile] treaty has essentially become policy, as have other CSP reports opposing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the International Criminal Court.”

Source: Center for Security Policy 98-D139

Feith’s private business dealings have also raised eyebrows in Washington. In 1999, his firm Feith & Zell formed an alliance with the Israel-based Zell, Goldberg & Co., which resulted in the creation of the Fandz International Law Group. According to Fandz’s web site, the law group “has recently established a task force dealing with issues and opportunities relating to the recently ended war with Iraq. ... and is assisting regional construction and logistics firms to collaborate with contractors from the United States and other coalition countries in implementing infrastructure and other reconstruction projects in Iraq.” Remarked Washington Post columnist Al Kamen, “Interested parties can reach [Fandz] through its Web site, at www.fandz.com. Fandz.com? Hmmm. Rings a bell. Oh, yes, that was the Web site of the Washington law firm of Feith & Zell, P.C., as in Douglas Feith [the] undersecretary of defense for policy and head of -- what else? -- reconstruction matters in Iraq. It would be impossible indeed to overestimate how perfect ZGC would be in ‘assisting American companies in their relations with the United States government in connection with Iraqi reconstruction projects.’”

Affiliations

Contact Information

Resources and articles

Related SourceWatch articles

Profiles

Articles by Douglas J. Feith

External articles

1996
2001
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007

Categories: Equivocator of Torture | George W. Bush | Neocons

The PA is not the only entity to offer payments to terrorists and their families. Hamas, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — similar to the PA — also provide money to the families of so-called “martyrs.” As the terror analyst Matthew Levitt noted in his 2006 book "Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad," these efforts shore up support and incentivize carrying out attacks. All of these organizations are U.S.-designated terrorist groups. By contrast, the PA pretenses moderation and is a major recipient of U.S. aid. That aid, as Rosenbaum notes, makes fungible the PA’s ability to pay terrorists — directly contradicting stated U.S. objectives to advance peace and prevent terrorism.

According to Rosenbaum, the PA allocated nearly 7 percent of its 2016 budget to paying incarcerated prisoners and the families of those killed while carrying out attacks. Indeed asDoug Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Sander Gerber, a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, have noted, the authority has created the Prisoners and Released Prisoners Ministry and the Institution for the Care for the Families of Martyrs to manage these payments. The former is a cabinet level post and in 2016 were allocated a combined total of more than $300 million.

Some have said it's false that “the more Jews a Palestinian kills, the more money they will get.” But as Feith and Gerber point out, payments and benefits are predicated, in part, on the length of sentence. So the greater the crime, the greater the payoff.

Arguments that cite the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict as being about “land, borders and security” overlook the role that glorifying anti-Jewish violence plays in Palestinian society. Under the Palestinian Authority, sports tournaments and streets are named after slain terrorists, and official media and school textbooks routinely deny Israel’s right to exist within any borders. As PMW has documented, candy is handed out in Palestinian streets in celebration after Jews have been murdered and murderers like Muhannad Shafeq Halabi — who stabbed a two-year-old child in an October 2015 attack — are rewarded with posthumous honorary college degrees from PA-supported institutions.

Rewarding and celebrating those who commit terror attacks has played a particularly pernicious role in perpetuating the conflict. A failure to acknowledge this fact makes peace less likely and bloodshed more certain — and tragically profitable.

Seans Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.