Pentagon's Feith in the eye of another
storm By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- Although it will take weeks, if not months, to sort
out precisely who was responsible for what increasingly
appears to have been the systemic abuse by US soldiers
of Iraqi detainees, it should be no surprise if Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith is found
to have played an important role.
Feith, who
according to Bob Woodward's new book Plan of
Attack was described by the military commander who
led last year's invasion, General Tommie Franks, as "the
f****ng stupidest guy on the face of the Earth", has
been at the center of virtually everything else that has
gone wrong in Iraq, so there is no reason to think he
was very far from this one.
It was his office,
for example, that created shortly after September 11,
2001, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group and the
Office of Special Plans (OSP), which reassessed 12 years
of raw intelligence and the Arab press to find evidence
of ties between the regime of former Iraq president
Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist group. The OSP
then "stovepiped" that information, unvetted by
professional intelligence analysts, straight to Vice
President Dick Cheney's office for use by the White
House.
Similarly, it was Feith's office, along
with the Defense Policy Group, whose members Feith
appointed, that served as the point of entry and
influence for Iraqi National Congress (INC) chief Ahmed
Chalabi and his "defectors", who provided phony
intelligence about Saddam's vast stockpiles of weapons
of mass destruction.
It was Feith's office that
was charged with planning the postwar occupation and
reconstruction process, and, in so doing, in effect
excluded input from Iraq experts from the State
Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and even
from the Iraqi-American community, who had participated
in a mammoth project that anticipated most of the
problems occupation authorities have since encountered.
And it was Feith's office that also housed the
future under secretary for intelligence, Stephen
Cambone, who facilitated the transfer of Major-General
Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the Guantanamo Bay
detention camp that houses suspected al-Qaeda and
Taliban prisoners, to Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in
the interests of extracting more intelligence from
detainees there about the fast-growing insurgency in
Iraq.
Both Cambone and Miller, who brought
high-pressure interrogation tactics barred by the Geneva
Conventions with him from Guantanamo, are considered
prime targets of ongoing congressional investigations
into the prisoner-abuse scandal.
But the
announcement on Tuesday by Senate Armed Services
Committee chairman John Warner that he is seeking
testimony in the coming weeks from Feith may have
unwittingly cast new light on the reasons why Secretary
of State Colin Powell is alleged by Woodward to have
referred to Feith's operation as the "Gestapo office".
Evidence of Feith's involvement in the
prisoner-abuse scandal rests primarily on reports that
have appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times and the
Los Angeles Times. They have reported that even before
the Iraq war, top officials in the Pentagon, acting on
the advice of civilian lawyers, authorized a
reinterpretation of the Geneva Conventions to permit
tougher methods of interrogation of prisoners of war.
This effort was strongly resisted by Powell, a
retired army general, when it came to his attention, and
by the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, the formal
name given to the military's lawyers. They argued, among
other things, that the introduction of "stress and
duress" techniques, sleep deprivation and other methods
that violate the conventions would not only result in
dubious intelligence, but could also be cited as a
precedent for use against US soldiers who fell into
enemy hands.
Dissenters, however, were in
essence excluded from the discussion and, according to
Newsweek, new techniques were formally approved during
the Iraq invasion in April 2003, although Feith's
immediate superior, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, testified last week that he was unaware of
such a decision.
At the same time, senior
Pentagon officials also authorized the exclusion of JAG
officers from observing interrogations to ensure they
complied with the conventions. That was a major
departure from the practice in the 1991 Gulf War, when
JAG officers were present in all interrogation
facilities and could intercede if they witnessed
violations of the conventions.
Even after the
new orders came down, senior JAG officers did not give
up. According to a number of accounts, a delegation of
officers contacted Scott Horton, a former high-ranking
JAG officer and chairman of the Committee on
International Human Rights of the New York City Bar
Association, to see if he and like-minded lawyers would
intervene.
"They were extremely upset," Horton
told the Los Angeles Times. "They said they were being
shut out of the process, and that the civilian political
lawyers, not the military lawyers, were writing these
new rules of engagement."
Horton said the JAG
officers identified the main forces behind loosening the
rules as Feith and the Pentagon's general counsel,
William Haynes, another political appointee.
"If
we - 'we' being the uniformed lawyers - had been
listened to, and what we said put into practice, then
these abuses would not have occurred," Rear Admiral Don
Guter, the navy JAG from 2000-02, told ABC News.
Feith, who was also interviewed by ABC, denied
there was any disagreement from JAG officers concerning
rules and practices authorized by his office, but the
issue is unlikely to rest with his word alone.
Indeed, the accounts given by JAG officers are
fully consistent with what is already known about
Feith's policymaking practices. As with the prewar
intelligence and prewar planning for the occupation, the
experts and professionals were either circumvented or
systematically excluded from participating in the policy
process, so that civilian ideologues with ideas about
how to extract information from uncooperative Arabs, for
example, would not have to address informed criticism
before plunging ahead.
Like his mentor, former
Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, Feith has
long been a hardliner on foreign policy, arms-control
issues and Israel.
As a youth, his father, Dalck
Feith, was active in pre-World War II Poland in Betar, a
militantly Zionist movement and forerunner of Israel's
Likud Party. His parents perished in the Nazi Holocaust,
according to the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal,
which last week demanded a public apology from Powell
for his reference to Feith's operation as the "Gestapo
office".
Feith worked for Perle in the Pentagon
under president Ronald Reagan, and the two teamed up in
the late 1980s to lobby on behalf of the Turkish
government and build military ties between Turkey and
Israel. In 1996 he participated in a private study by a
right-wing Israeli think-tank that called for ousting
Saddam Hussein as a way to transform the balance of
power in the Middle East in such a way that Israel could
ignore pressure to trade "land for peace" with the
Palestinians or Syria.
In 1997, Feith argued in
Commentary magazine for Israel to reoccupy the Occupied
Territories and repudiate the Oslo accords, and the
following year he signed an open letter to
then-president Bill Clinton calling for Washington to
work with Chalabi's INC to oust Saddam.
