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Push to blame the Iraq war on "Jewish influence" sounds a familiar theme http://www.jewishworldreview.com | A few months ago, a great deal of tut-tutting and dignified outrage emanated from much of the civilized world over the broadcast of a series on Egyptian television which sought to dramatize the "truth" of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But, as the debate over President Bush's rightful determination to pursue war against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein heats up, it looks like the dimwitted propagandists who write scripts for Egyptian potboilers have been sharing sources with prominent Washington pundits, leftist anti-war...

On the occasion of the publication of the paperback version of his book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, Douglas J. Feith participated in a conference call this afternoon with a number of bloggers, including FinkelBlog. Feith served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for United States President George W. Bush. He worked closely with the President, Vice-President and Defense Secretary Cheney in formulating US policy on Iraq and Afghanistan. Highlights from Feith’s remarks: * Even though the rhetoric of the Obama campaign was harsh toward the Bush administration on...

Order of BattleWar and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism by Douglas FeithHarper. 688 pp. $27.95 "The stupidest f—ing guy on the planet” is how General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, summed up Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Pentagon from July 2001 until his resignation in August 2005. Franks was cruder than most, but Feith was under almost continuously hostile scrutiny and controversy throughout his tenure. As the third-highest ranking civilian official in Donald Rumsfeld’s wartime Pentagon, he oversaw the Defense Department’s relations with foreign governments at...

If you want to read a serious book about the intervention in Iraq, look to Douglas Feith. When Bush's Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill defected from the Cabinet in 2002 and Ron Suskind told O'Neill's story of being surrounded by fools, Michael Kinsley observed that the president deserved all he got from the book. Anyone dumb enough to hire a fool like O'Neill in the first place ought to have known what to expect. So it goes with the ludicrous figure of Scott McClellan. I used to watch this mooncalf blunder his way through press conferences and think, Exactly where do...

A few days ago I had an opportunity to discuss the pithy but engagingly written book War and Decision with its author, Douglas Feith. The book is lengthy -- with endnotes it runs to 653 pages -- but has the virtue the other books about the internal processes on the Iraq war decision-making lack. It is well-detailed and superbly documented rather than the on-the-fly and off-the top-of-the-head self-serving and extensively reviewed accounts written by the other authors. Feith's version of events is drawn from memos, briefings and his personal contemporaneous notes which, to the extent that they've been declassified, you...

Douglas Feith, the former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, has embarked on that most difficult and worthy of voyages: to set the record straight on the run-up to the War in Iraq. Yesterday, his voyage brought him to the Daily Show, deep into the heart of uninformed territory...

May 10, 2008, 8:30 a.m. Warring HistoryRethinking the Iraq critics. By Michael Barone In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we’ve learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists only could guess at what was going on behind the scenes. Today we’re only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes in...

Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do. Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s...

Former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith fights back bogus stories on him on his new website. The Hugh Hewitt Show HH: Douglas Feith served as the undersecretary of defense for policy from July, 2001 until August of 2005. He is currently a professor and distinguished practitioner in national security policy at Georgetown University. He’s also a Belfer Center visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford. Welcome back, Doug Feith. I also want to add to this resume now that you are an innovator in the use of...

Promoters of the "Bush Lied, People Died" line claim that the recent Pentagon inspector general's report concerning my former office's work on Iraq intelligence supports their cause. What the IG actually said is a different story. The IG, Thomas Gimble, focused on a single Pentagon briefing from 2002 -- a critique of the CIA's work on the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship. His report concluded that the work my office generated was entirely lawful and authorized, and that Sen. Carl Levin was wrong to allege that we misled Congress Gimble made Levin happy, however, by calling the Pentagon briefing "inappropriate," a word the...

| 8:30 PM Here is the transcript of my interview with former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.  The audio will be posted here later. Some key excerpts: HH: Do you believe, as opposed to your staff, that the CIA was filtering its own intelligence, Mr. Feith? DF: Yes, I think that there were people, there were people in the CIA who had a theory that the Baathist secularists would not cooperate with the religious extremists in al Qaeda. And because they had that theory, when they looked at information that was, that showed, or that suggested that there was cooperation,...

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...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

<p>WASHINGTON — A senior Defense official placed under investigation by the FBI (news - web sites) on allegations that he tried to steer Iraqi reconstruction contracts toward friends has been removed from office, Pentagon (news - web sites) officials confirmed Friday.</p>

Fury over Pentagon cell that briefed White House on Iraq's 'imaginary' al-Qaeda links By Julian Coman in Washington (Filed: 11/07/2004) 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, according to the Senate intelligence committee. The allegations about Douglas Feith, the number three at the Department of Defence, are made in a supplementary annexe of the committee's review of the intelligence leading to war in Iraq, released on Friday. According to dramatic testimony contained in the...

They are getting ready to play one of the favorite games in our nation's capital -- a political version of pin the tail on the donkey. In the case at hand, the donkey is the Central Intelligence Agency and its director, George Tenet. The trouble is that all the donkeys eligible for the tail won't be in the corral when the game begins. The powers on Capitol Hill want someone to take the fall for all the bad prewar intelligence on Iraq, and since the Republicans will make certain that their President isn't the fall guy, and make certain the...

<p>Senate Intelligence Committee leaders plan to ask the Justice Department to investigate who leaked a top-secret Pentagon memo sent to the committee.</p> <p>The Oct. 27 memo from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith provided details of intelligence linking Usama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and the toppled Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein (search). Details of the memo were published in the Nov. 24 issue of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine.</p>

No. 851-03 IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 15, 2003 DoD Statement on News Reports of al-Qaida and Iraq ConnectionsNews reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate. A letter was sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 27, 2003 from Douglas J. Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in response to follow-up questions from his July 10 testimony. One of the questions posed by the committee asked the Department to provide the reports from the Intelligence Community to which he referred...

 THIS STORY MUSTN'T DIE: What to make of the Weekly Standard's publication of a leaked memo from neocon Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, to the Senate Intelligence Committee? Well, I'm not someone used to reading classified CIA documents and being able to separate the wheat from the chaff. But reading Stephen Hayes' summary of the document, I have to say this strikes me as a Big Deal. So far, the liberal media outlets seem to have ignored this, and it didn't help that the Weekly Standard's website was down for a while. Anti-war reporter Walter Pincus, in the Washington Post, has...

DoD Statement on News Reports of al-Qaida and Iraq Connections News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate. A letter was sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 27, 2003 from Douglas J. Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in response to follow-up questions from his July 10 testimony. One of the questions posed by the committee asked the Department to provide the reports from the Intelligence Community to which he referred in his testimony before the Committee....