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"America is a strange country. All of its best generals are journalists," quipped Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith in the middle of an interview Thursday. Touché, as fencers say. I never served in the military, haven't been to Iraq and don't know if the criticism that the Bush administration has not put enough troops in Iraq is accurate or not -- although I pay attention when veterans who return from Iraq say as much. So I'll pass on what Feith said to me and you can decide. Columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times Thursday that more troops...

WASHINGTON (AP) - A Pentagon official accused by a leading Senate Democrat of deceiving Congress about intelligence on Iraq's pre-war links to the al-Qaida terrorist network says the dispute is based on a misunderstanding that could have been avoided if he had been asked to explain. In a letter to Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Douglas Feith laid out in detail his handling of CIA reports on the Iraq-al-Qaida relationship and denied that he ignored corrections requested by the CIA when he gave a summary of the reports to Congress in...

WASHINGTON -- A Pentagon official accused by a leading Senate Democrat of deceiving Congress about intelligence on Iraq's pre-war links to the al-Qaida terrorist network says the dispute is based on a misunderstanding that could have been avoided if he had been asked to explain. In a letter to Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Douglas Feith laid out in detail his handling of CIA reports on the Iraq-al-Qaida relationship and denied that he ignored corrections requested by the CIA when he gave a summary of the reports to Congress in January...

FBI probes DOD office By Richard Sale UPI Intelligence Correspondent 8/28/04 The FBI has intensified its investigation of senior members of what was formerly known as the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans on suspicion that one of them passed highly classified U.S. military information to the government of Israel, according to federal law enforcement officials. In some cases, colleagues, former associates and members of other government agencies have been interviewed as many as four times by teams of FBI agents, FBI officials told United Press International. Two of the people interviewed are Bill Luti, former chief of OSP, and Harold...

Rumsfeld Defends Aide From Franks Attack WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday defended a top aide who was severely criticized by Gen. Tommy Franks, the top U.S. commander in the Iraq war. In an interview with The Associated Press, Rumsfeld called Undersecretary Douglas Feith "without question one of the most brilliant individuals in government." Franks wrote in his autobiography "American Soldier" that Feith was "getting a reputation around here as the dumbest (expletive) guy on the planet." While Feith, a lawyer schooled at Harvard and Georgetown, had academic credentials and was personally likable, he posed "off-the-wall questions...

The Pentagon is accusing Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of distorting the intelligence work of its No. 3 civilian official, and calling on the Democrat to prove his charges or retract them.     It is unusual for the Pentagon to formally take on a sitting senator. In this case, the challenge came in a letter to Mr. Rockefeller on Friday from Powell A. Moore, the assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs.     "On behalf of the department, I request that, if you have any evidence supporting the serious charge you floated during your press conference, you provide it to the department,"...

Conventional Warfare: The Pentagon and the military respect the Geneva Conventions. BY DOUGLAS J. FEITH Monday, May 31, 2004 12:01 a.m. In the months following 9/11, the Bush administration asked itself how the laws of war apply to the war on terrorism. The question is not simple, for the Geneva Conventions say that they apply to conflicts between states that are parties; but al Qaeda is a terrorist network and not a state, let alone a party to the Geneva Conventions. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked his team how best to think this through. The Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen....

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A Pentagon (news - web sites) e-mail said Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) coordinated a huge Halliburton government contract for Iraq (news - web sites), despite Cheney's denial of interest in the company he ran until 2000. The March 5, 2003 e-mail, from an Army Corps of Engineers official, said that top Pentagon official Douglas Feith got the job of shepherding the contract, according to the newsweekly Time that hits newsstands Monday. Feith had approved the multi-billion-dollar deal "contingent on informing WH (the White House) tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been...

<p>Pentagon officials are moving to tighten control over security contractors whose intelligence-gathering activities in Iraq are largely outside the control of U.S., military, international or Iraqi law.</p> <p>Worried about the lack of oversight of the companies, and the nebulous relationship between them and the military, the Pentagon said it was moving to bring them into line.</p>

WASHINGTON: Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, a two-man intelligence team set up shop at the Pentagon, searching for evidence of links between terrorist groups and host countries. The men, Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, culled classified material, much of it uncorroborated data from the CIA. "We discovered tons of raw intelligence," said Maloof. "We were stunned that we couldn't find any mention of it in the CIA's finished reports." They recorded and annotated their evidence on butcher paper hung like a mural around their small office. By the end of 2001, they had constructed a startling new picture of...