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Douglas Feith
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Douglas J. Feith (born July 16, 1953) served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for United States President George W. Bush from July 2001 until he resigned from his position effective August 8, 2005. His official responsibilities included the formulation of defense planning guidance and forces policy, United States Department of Defense (DoD) relations with foreign countries, and DoD's role in U.S. Government interagency policymaking.
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Douglas J. Feith (born July 16, 1953) served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for United States President George W. Bush from July 2001 until he resigned from his position effective August 8, 2005. His official responsibilities included the formulation of defense planning guidance and forces policy, United States Department of Defense (DoD) relations with foreign countries, and DoD's role in U.S. Government interagency policymaking. A member of the neoconservative movement, his tenure in that position was marked by controversy.
Upon his resignation, Feith joined the faculty of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, as a Professor and Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy, for a two year stint despite strong objections from the student body and faculty. His contract was not renewed due to strong opposition from members of the faculty, despite "really good" teaching reviews. Currently, Feith is the Director of the Center for National Security Strategies and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think-tank.
Early life
Feith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was one of three siblings born to Rose and Dalck Feith. His father, Dalck, was a member of the Betar, a Revisionist Zionist youth organization, in Poland, and a Holocaust survivor who lost his parents and seven siblings in the Nazi concentration camps. He came to the United States during World War II, and became a successful businessman, a philanthropist, and a donor to the Republican party, and imbued his son with strong and lifelong opinions about government and international relations. Years later, Feith noted: "[Neville] Chamberlain wasn’t popular in my house".
Feith grew up in Elkins Park, part of Cheltenham Township, a Philadelphia suburb. Feith came of age during the tumultuous Civil Rights and Vietnam War era. He attended Philadelphia's Central High School. Of that, Feith wrote "It's a good school. The class that I was in at Central was the most talented group of kids that I ever went to school with, including college and law school."
Feith attended Harvard University for his undergraduate degree and graduated magna cum laude in 1975. While at Harvard, Feith says he "benefited especially from the lectures and books of Professor Richard Pipes", the head of Harvard's Russian Research Center. Feith later said of his tutelage under Pipes: "We were part of a rather small minority in Cambridge who thought that working to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union was not only a noble pursuit, but a realistic project." Feith also cites the works of philosophers John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke as two major intellectual influences. He continued on to the Georgetown University Law Center, receiving his J.D. magna cum laude in 1978.
Pipes ultimately provided Feith with his initial entry into government. Pipes had joined the Reagan administration's National Security Council in 1981 to help carry out the "project" Pipes and his students had conceived. Feith joined the NSC that same year, working under Pipes. Before that, he worked for three years as an attorney with the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP.
Feith has expressed ambivalence about the overall intellectual pedigree Harvard gives its students. In an address on March 3, 2005 to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government he said, "I want to reassure the students in the audience: a Harvard degree does not have to be a liability. In conservative political circles, I've found, it may require some explaining."
Married with four children, Feith makes his home in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Maryland.
Career
Feith began his career as an attorney in private practice, and first entered government as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan in 1981. He transferred from the NSC Staff to Pentagon in 1982 to work as Special Counsel for Richard Perle, who was then serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger promoted Feith in 1984 to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy and, when Feith left the Pentagon in 1986, Weinberger gave him the highest Defense Department civilian award, the Distinguished Public Service medal.
During his time in the Pentagon in the Reagan administration, Feith was instrumental in getting the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Weinberger and Shultz all to recommend (successfully) to the President not to ratify changes to the Geneva Conventions. The changes, known as Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, would have allowed non-state militants to be treated as combatants and prisoners of war even if they had engaged in practices that endangered non-combatants or otherwise violated the laws of war. Reagan informed the United States Senate in 1987 that he would not ratify Protocol I. At the time, both the Washington Post and the New York Times editorialized in favor of Reagan's decision to reject Protocol I as a revision of humanitarian law that protected terrorists.
Upon leaving the Pentagon, Feith co-founded, with Marc Zell, the Washington, DC law firm of Feith & Zell. Three years later, Feith was retained as a lobbyist by the Turkish government. Among other clients, his firm represented defense corporations Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Feith left the firm in 2001, following his nomination as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.
As Under Secretary, Feith continued to champion US respect for the Geneva Conventions, e.g. his Op-Ed article "Conventional Warfare" in the Wall Street Journal on May 24, 2004. When the logic of Reagan's decision on Protocol I was applied by Bush in 2001 in designating Al Qaeda fighters as "enemy combatants" or "unlawful combatants" rather than as "prisoners of war" a passionate debate ensued (and continues) as to whether one is undermining or supporting the Geneva Conventions by designating combatants as "terrorists" and denying detainees POW status.
Following his government service, Feith was employed by the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he taught a course on the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policy. He came to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service after leaving Stanford's Hoover Institution and was appointed by School of Foreign Service Dean, Ambassador Robert Gallucci. However, his hiring "caused an uproar among the faculty" and two years later, his contract was not renewed.
Feith has also set up a personal website () to counter what he sees as spurious and unfounded claims about his tenure in government. It primarily deals with Inspector-General's Thomas Gimble's 2005 report that called Feith's actions in critiquing CIA intelligence "inappropriate", although not illegal.
Views and publications
Like his father, Feith is a Republican, and has contributed money to various party candidates over the years. Sympathetic to the neoconservative wing of the party, he has over the last 30 years published many works on U.S. national security policy. His work on US–Soviet détente, arms control and Arab–Israeli issues generated considerable debate.
Feith's writings on international law and on foreign and defense policy have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The New Republic and elsewhere. He has contributed chapters to a number of books, including James W. Muller's Churchill as Peacemaker, Raphael Israeli's The Dangers of a Palestinian State and Uri Ra'anan's Hydra of Carnage: International Linkages of Terrorism, as well as serving as co-editor for Israel's Legitimacy in Law and History.
Feith has long advocated a policy of "peace through strength". He was an outspoken skeptic of U.S.-Soviet détente and of the Oslo, Hebron and Wye Processes on Palestinian-Israeli peace. In particular, he criticized the Oslo Accords and the Camp David peace agreement mediated by former President Carter between Egypt and Israel. In 1997, he published a lengthy article in Commentary, titled "A Strategy for Israel". In it, Feith argued that the Oslo Accords were being undermined by Yasser Arafat's failure to fulfill peace pledges and Israel's failure to uphold the integrity of the accords it had concluded with Arafat. Furthermore, he was an opponent of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the International Criminal Court and the Chemical Weapons Convention which he criticized as ineffective and dangerous to U.S. interests.
In 1998, Feith was one of a number of U.S. officials who signed an open letter to President Bill Clinton calling for the United States to oust Saddam Hussein. Feith was part of a group of former national security officials in the 1990s who supported Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress and encouraged the U.S. Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. Congress approved the Act, and Clinton signed it into law.
Feith generally favors US support for Israel and has promoted US-Israeli cooperation. He was a member of the study group which authored a controversial report entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, a set of policy recommendations for the newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The report was published by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies without an individual author being named. According to the report, Feith was one of the people who participated in roundtable discussions that produced ideas that the report reflects. Feith pointed out in a September 16, 2004 letter to the editor of the Washington Post that he was not the co-author and did not clear the report's final text. He wrote, "There is no warrant for attributing any particular idea [in the report], let alone all of them, to any one participant."
Feith also served on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a think tank that promotes a military and strategic alliance between the United States and Israel.
Feith was one of 18 founding members of the organization One Jerusalem to oppose the Oslo peace agreement. Its purpose is "saving a united Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel." He is also Director of Foundation for Jewish Studies, which "offers in-depth study programs for the adult Washington Jewish community that cross denominational lines."
Feith told The New Yorker in 2005, "When history looks back, I want to be in the class of people who did the right thing, the sensible thing, and not necessarily the fashionable thing, the thing that met the aesthetic of the moment".
Feith was interviewed by the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes in a segment that was aired on April 6, 2008. During this interview he promoted his newly released memoir, War and Decision and defended the decision making that led to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In a response to the question on why the United States invaded Iraq, Feith responded, "The President decided that the threats from the Saddam Hussein regime were so great that if we had left him in power, we would be fighting him down the road, at a time and place of his choosing."
Feith explained that attacking Iraq was necessary even though the U.S. government realized that Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, because of the need for the U.S. to exercise its right to "anticipatory self-defense."
"What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11. Our main goal was preventing the next attack."
Regarding the false claims of the Bush Administration that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction, Feith concedes, "It is true that there was a serious error that the CIA made in saying that we would find WMD stockpiles. And it was a terrible mistake for the administration to have made those stockpiles in any way a part of the case for war. I don't think we needed to."
Feith also concedes that he and his colleagues didn’t realize that sending a smaller, mobile force to topple Saddam would make it difficult to establish order after he fell. "The looting that arose in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam ... was a problem that the coalition forces had to deal with. I think we paid a very large price for the fact that, you know, our forces did not get that problem under control."
Regarding whether he's happy about the current situation in Iraq, Feith states, "I don't think anybody can be happy. "We've, we've, we've had terrible losses. We have the Americans who have lost their lives, and Iraqis who have lost their lives. Our coalition partners. It's been a costly war."
But Feith still feels that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. "I think the president made the right decision given what he knew. And given what we all knew. And to tell you the truth, even given what we've learned since."
War and Decision
On April 8, 2008, Feith's memoir, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, was published by HarperCollins.
Professional praise
Former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld
"Doug Feith, of course, is without question, one of the most brilliant individuals in government. He is – he's just a rare talent. And from my standpoint, working with him is always interesting. He's been one of the really the intellectual leaders in the administration in defense policy aspects of our work here."
When Feith left the Defense Department in 2005, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld highlighted the following accomplishments:
- A plan to revamp America's Global Defense Posture – move troops, move families, move contractors, and facilities from where they were at the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War to where they’re needed and usable
- A NATO Response Force to counter threats and to deal with crises
- New security relationships in Central Asia and South Asia;
- Helping to fashion a new National Security Defense Strategy that helps guide DoD in planning assumptions for the war on terrorism as well as other responsibilities.
- The training and equipping of foreign forces;
- The creation of an Office of Post-conflict Reconstruction in the Department of State; and
- The Global Peace Operations Initiative.
In his speech, Rumsfeld said:
- Years from now, unfortunately it may be many years, accurate accounts of what's taking place these past four years will be written and it will show that Doug Feith has performed his duties with great dedication, with impressive skill and with remarkable vision during this perilous and indeed momentous period in the life of our country.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Ret.) Air Force General Richard Myers
Richard Myers credited Feith with a "great perspective" and "great respect for the military."
In planning the war with Iraq, Feith "looked at implications of various actions that others might not think about", Myers said. "Doug is very bright and brings a very good strategic view to the table. He has solved some real problems."
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine General Peter Pace
United States Marine Corps General Peter Pace, now the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, worked closely with Feith, co-chairing with him the Defense Department's Campaign Planning Committee (CAPCOM).
At Feith's farewell-from-government ceremony on August 8, 2005, Pace as then vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said:
- Doug Feith is a patriot. It irritates me, not that anyone would question his thoughts or his policies – that is absolutely fair game – but that anyone would question his loyalty or his motives. I have watched this man for four years. He cares only about what is best for the United States. He works hard to understand as much as he can about the policy arena, and he works hard to articulate what he believes to be true.
The New Yorker May 9, 2005 (p. 36) interviewed Pace about Franks' criticism [see below] and reported: "Pace, who calls Feith a 'true American patriot,' said he did not understand Franks' attack. 'This is not directed at any individual,' Pace said, 'but the less secure an individual is in his thought processes and in his own capacities, the more prone they were to be intimidated by Doug, because he's so smart.'" Pace believes "Early on, [Feith] didn’t realize that the way he presented his positions, the way he was being perceived, put him in a bit of a hole. But he changed his ways."
The same article reported on Rumsfeld's reaction to Franks:
Feith's most prominent defender is Rumsfeld, who told me that Feith is "one of the brightest people you or I will ever come across. He's diligent, very well read, and insightful." Donald Rumsfeld, Feith's former boss, is also General Pace's superior, and appointed both Feith and Pace to their posts. Donald Rumsfeld explained Feith's trouble with Franks this way: "If you're a combatant commander and you're in the area of operations and you're hearing from people in Washington, what you're hearing is frequently not on point to what you're worrying about at the moment, just as the reverse is also true'"
National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley
In a letter to Feith on the day of his resignation from government, August 8, 2005, Stephen Hadley wrote:
- Your efforts in developing the war on terrorism strategy, the global defense posture, the President's June 24, 2002, Middle East speech, and moving forward the president's agenda on advancing freedom and democracy are among your many significant accomplishments.
- For the last four years, you and your fine staff have provided outstanding support to Secretary Rumsfeld and the President.
- Your intellectual leadership within the interagency has helped us meet the challenges that face our nation at this critical time. But equally important, you have provided an example of honesty, decency, and integrity that have made you a valued colleague and friend to us all.
Professional criticism
Director of the CIA, Michael Hayden
At Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden's Senate confirmation hearing, Senator Carl Levin asked nominee Hayden about Feith's Office of Special Plans:
- Senator Carl Levin: "Were you comfortable with Mr. Feith's office approach to intelligence analysis?"
- CIA Director Michael Hayden: "No, sir, I wasn’t. I wasn’t aware of a lot of the activity going on, you know, when it was contemporaneous with running up to the war. No, sir, I wasn’t comfortable."
The June 27, 2006 Wall Street Journal ran an article called "Hayden Corrects the Record." It pointed out that though Levin drew this comment from Hayden when the General was speaking extemporaneously, Hayden corrected the record afterward to clarify that his comments were not meant to say that Feith's work was wrong, misleading or inaccurate. According to the Wall Street Journal, "General Hayden has now publicly confirmed what he had previously said in private conversations with Mr. Feith and with Arizona Senator Jon Kyl: To wit, that he did not intend those remarks as Senator Levin has spun them. In a letter to Mr. Kyl, General Hayden concedes that as former Director of the National Security Agency "I did not have any significant personal contact with Mr. Feith or his office and only occasionally saw the product of their work."
Hayden's letter adds that "the issues I attempted to address were focused on broad questions of analytic tradecraft, not characterizing the work of Mr. Feith's office let alone attempting to address questions of lawfulness or even appropriateness. My comments about ‘wrong,’ ‘inaccurate,’ and ‘misleading’ were attached to a broader discussion of analytic challenges and not to any specific activities, including those under Mr. Feith."
Former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
According to the long-running Washington newsletter, The Nelson Report, edited by Christopher Nelson, quoting an anonymous source, Feith was standing in for Rumsfeld at a 2003 interagency 'Principals' Meeting' debating the Middle East, and ended his remarks on behalf of the Pentagon. Then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, "Thanks Doug, but when we want the Israeli position we'll invite the ambassador."
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell
In Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, then-United States Secretary of State Colin Powell called Feith's operation at the Pentagon the "Gestapo" office, alleging that it amounted to a separate, unchecked governing authority within the Pentagon.
Soon after publication of the book, Powell said:
I don't recall saying that, but it is a terrible term to use and it is out of place, completely out of place. I have known Doug Feith for many years. We have agreed on many issues and disagreed on some. And I just regret that that has gotten into the literature and become a fact.
An unnamed Bush administration official said to reporters from Newsday that "Secretary of State Colin Powell complained directly to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld several days ago about Feith's policy shop conducting missions that countered US policy."
Former Pentagon Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski (ret)
Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who was a Desk Officer in Feith's Policy organization, spoke of Feith's style:
- "He was very arrogant", 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."
Kwiatkowski believes an article that appeared in The Weekly Standard included a written by Feith alleging ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
Former Director of the CIA, George Tenet
The chapter "No Authority, Direction, or Control" of George Tenet's memoir deals with the prewar government debate about alleged connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda. According to the Washington Post, Tenet's memoir paints an "unflattering portrait of Feith as a man eager to manipulate intelligence to push the country to war." Tenet refers to Feith's office as "Team Feith", writing that he saw their criticisms about the CIA's Iraq-al Qaeda work as "complete crap." He added that "when the Pentagon inspector general issued a report in February 2007 calling some of Feith's efforts 'inappropriate', Feith shot back. He said peddling his alternative intelligence was simply an exercise in 'good government.' Nonsense (Tenet wrote). This was an example of bad government" (Tenet, page 348).
Feith reviewed Tenet's memoir and responded to the allegations about his work in the Wall Street Journal on May 4. On Tenet's account of the bureaucratic differences over Iraq-al Qaeda issues, Feith writes: "Mr. Tenet devotes a chapter to the matter of Iraq and al Qaeda, giving it the title: 'No Authority, Direction or Control.' The phrase implies that we argued that Saddam exercised such powers – authority, direction and control – over al Qaeda. We made no such argument. Rather we said that the CIA's analysts were not giving serious, professional attention to information about ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. The CIA's assessments were incomplete, nonrigorous and shaped around the dubious assumption that secular Iraqi Baathists would be unwilling to cooperate with al Qaeda religious fanatics, even when they shared strategic interests. This assumption was disproved when Baathists and jihadists became allies against us in the post-Saddam insurgency, but before the war it was the foundation of much CIA analysis."
Former Commander Coalition Forces in Iraq, Gen. Tommy Franks (ret)
Before the war in Iraq, the Iraqi National Congress proposed recruiting a brigade of Free Iraqi Forces to enter Iraq with the Americans. Feith supported the idea behind the project. United States Army General Tommy Franks did not, as reported in the book Cobra II: "Franks remained unenthusiastic, to say the least. After a briefing from [Feith's aide Bill] Luti on his pet project, Franks turned to Feith in a Pentagon corridor, letting him know where he stood: 'I don't have time for this fucking bullshit,' Franks exclaimed."
Franks, according to Plan of Attack, says of Feith: "I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the planet almost every day." (p.281). In his autobiography, American Soldier, Franks describes a conversation with his subordinates who were upset with Rumsfeld, Feith and Paul Wolfowitz; Franks tells them, "Here's the deal, guys. I know OSD - Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith - are demanding a lot. But they are not the enemy. Don't start thinking good guys-bad guys. We're all on the same side." They could see I was serious. "I'll worry about OSD, all of them - including Doug Feith, who's getting a reputation around here as the dumbest fucking guy on the planet", I continued. "Your job is to make me feel warm and fuzzy. Look, we're all professionals. Let's earn our pay."
On the April 14, 2006 edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews, Franks changed his assessment of Feith:
- MATTHEWS: What did you think on a scale of one to 10 of the military expertise, of the civilians surrounding Secretary Rumsfeld, the people like Wolfowitz and Feith? How would you on a scale of 1 to 10, where would you put their military savvy?
- FRANKS: I would put the dipstick at oh — with a reasonable degree of understanding, I would put Doug Feith in a category as a brilliant man with some military understanding, but both of these gentlemen were apt to think out of the box. And candidly, Chris, for all I know, maybe that's what Don Rumsfeld wanted them to do.
- MATTHEWS: Were they ideologues or were they analysts?
- FRANKS: In my personal [opinion], they were analysts. Now, that does not imply that I'm making some statement that they were not ideologues, maybe so, but that's not the way that I saw them.
Former Coalition Provisional Authority Official General Jay Garner (Ret.)
The former Director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for the Coalition Provisional Authority, General Jay Garner, reported to Feith for five months following the invasion of Iraq. As quoted in Thomas E. Ricks's book Fiasco, Garner said of Feith: "I think he's incredibly dangerous. He's a smart guy whose electrons aren't connected, so he arc lights all the time. He can't organize anything."
Former Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State, Larry Wilkerson
Regarding Feith and his colleague, David Wurmser, Wilkerson has stated:
- A lot of these guys, including Wurmser, I looked at as card-carrying members of the Likud party, as I did with Feith. You wouldn’t open their wallet and find a card, but I often wondered if their primary allegiance was to their own country or to Israel. That was the thing that troubled me, because there was so much that they said and did that looked like it was more reflective of Israel's interest than our own.
In 2005, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, publicly stated he could "testify to" Franks' 2004 comment, and added "Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man."
Former CENTCOM Deputy Director, Lt. General Michael DeLong
In an interview with PBS on February 14, 2006, General Michael DeLong was asked about the information coming from Feith's office in the lead-up to the Iraq war. He replied:
- Feith wasn't somebody we enjoyed working with, and to go much further than that would probably not be a good thing. To be honest, we blew him off lots of times. Told the secretary that he's full of baloney, his people working for him are full of baloney. It was a real distraction for us, because he was the number three guy in the Department of Defense.
Accusations and rebuttals
1982 NSC alleged firing and security clearance controversy
It has been alleged by former National Security Council Intelligence Director Vincent Cannistraro and author Stephen Green that Douglas Feith involuntarily left the NSC in March 1982 and lost his security clearance after he fell under Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) suspicion for passing classified material to Israeli embassy officials who were not entitled to receive it. This would have required the Bush administration to reissue Feith his clearance before bringing him into the Pentagon. This version of events is disputed by the NSC head at the time, Judge William Clark. When a Montana newspaper reported this accusation, Clark, who was Reagan's National Security Adviser at the relevant time, wrote a September 22, 2005 letter to the editor to correct the record:
- Your article cites a Mr. Cannistraro to the effect that Mr. Feith was fired for wrongdoing from President Reagan's National Security Council in 1982. I was President Reagan's National Security Advisor at the time and I tell you that is untrue. Mr. Feith served honorably on my staff and went on to serve well at the Pentagon under Secretary Cap Weinberger. Because of his fine record, President George W. Bush hired him as his Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
Counter Terrorism Evaluation Unit
Feith oversaw the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Unit, established to find links between terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. The group issued a report about connections between Iraq and al-Qaida that Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld requested Feith deliver to CIA Director George Tenet in August 2002. The report has been widely discredited. Tenet told a congressional committee in March 2004 that the report was not reliable. Daniel Benjamin, former director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, wrote that, far from proving Saddam-Osama ties, "the document lends substance to the frequently voiced criticism that some in the Bush administration have misused intelligence to advance their policy goals."
Office of Special Plans
Feith led the controversial Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Pentagon from September 2002 to June 2003. This now defunct intelligence gathering unit has been accused of manipulating intelligence to bolster support for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. According to The Guardian, "This rightwing intelligence network [was] set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force." According to Kwiatkowski, the Office of Special Plans was "a propaganda shop" and she personally "witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president." Senator Carl Levin, in an official report on the Office of Special Plans, singles Feith out as providing to the White House a large amount of Iraq-Al Qaeda allegations which, post-invasion, turned out to be false. Disarmament expert George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told National Public Radio in 2004, "By all accounts, things in Iraq have gone very, very badly. Doug Feith should have been fired a long time ago for incompetence."
According to The Guardian, the Office of Special Plans kept an extremely low profile, but was able to do the work of a much larger, high-profile organization:
There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.
"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.
As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends".
"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."
In fact, the OSP's activities were a complete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.
"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."
Actions Feith authorized at the Office of Special Plans concerning Iraq
A source of Iraqi WMD intelligence was overseas "back-channel" meetings with foreign citizens, which Feith authorized. According to Newsday and The Boston Globe, these foreigners included former Iran-Contra figures and agents of Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi who were shopping WMD intelligence to the Office of Special Plans..
As Kwiatkowski described, this unvetted WMD information was then "stovepiped" to the White House outside of established intelligence review safeguards for use in building support for the war. Post invasion, the Iraq Survey Group found Iraq had no stocks of WMD, and had not produced WMD since 1991.
These accounts conflict with the official findings of U.S. House and Senate inquiries into these matters. As noted a March 14, 2004 Washington Post article entitled "Feith's Analysts Given a Clean Bill": "Neither the House nor Senate intelligence committees...which have been investigating prewar intelligence for eight months, have found support for allegations that Pentagon analysts went out and collected their own intelligence.... Nor have investigators found that the Pentagon analysis about Iraq significantly shaped the case the administration made for going to war." The subjects of these investigations would be investigated again in 2006 by the Pentagon Inspector General (see below).
Actions Feith authorized at the Office of Special Plans concerning Iran
The "back-channel" meetings Feith authorized dealt not only with Iraq, but also with Iran. When Powell learned that Feith was authorizing secret meetings with former Iran-Contra figures such as arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar to investigate options for regime change in Iran, he angrily complained on August 9, 2003 directly to Rumsfeld and then Rice about Feith conducting unauthorized missions that were contrary to official U.S. policy. A senior administration official said the US Government had learned about the unauthorised talks "accidentally", and that it was unsettling "the government hadn't learnt the lessons of last time around", referring to the secret contacts and rogue operations that led to Iran-Contra.
Feith's authorization of contact with Manuchar Ghorbanifar was also controversial. The CIA said that Ghorbanifar "should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator", and put him under a burn notice, warning other intelligence agencies not to use him.
Investigations of the Office of Special Plans and of Feith
Officially, Feith is currently under investigation by the Pentagon's Inspector General and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). Republican Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts began the investigation when he wrote to the Pentagon Inspector General asking him to start the review:
"The Committee is concerned about persistent and, to date, unsubstantiated allegations that there was something unlawful or improper about the activities of the Office of Special Plans within the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy ... I have not discovered any credible evidence of unlawful or improper activity, yet the allegations persist." In an attempt to lay these allegations to rest once and for all, he requested the Inspector General to "initiate an investigation into the activities of the Office of Special Plans during the period prior to the initiation of Operation Iraqi Freedom to determine whether any of [its] activities were unlawful or improper; ... [that is,] whether the personnel assigned to the Office of Special Plans, at any time, conducted unauthorized, unlawful, or inappropriate intelligence activities." Senator Levin has asked the Inspector General to look at the activities of the OUSDP generally, and not just the OSP. The SSCI is awaiting the outcome of the DOD Inspector General's review." Sources within the SSCI report Feith and the Defense Department have been less than helpful to their investigation.
As of March 2006 the news organisation Rawstory reports Pat Roberts, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was not allowing a complete investigation of Feith and his role at his Office of Special Plans. "One former intelligence official suggested that part of the reason for deferring the Feith inquiry was its sensitivity. A Feith investigation might unravel a bigger can of worms, the source said"
The Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Jay Rockefeller twice alleged that the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy or Feith may have engaged in unlawful activities, Phase II of the Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq "found nothing to substantiate that claim; nothing unlawful about the "alleged" rogue intelligence operation in the PCTEG, nothing unlawful about the Office of Special Plans, and nothing unlawful about the so-called failure to inform Congress of alleged intelligence activities." The previous year, the chairman released a press statement claiming that it appeared that the offices were "not in compliance with the law."
Defense Department Inspector General Report Issued
Tasked to examine a briefing that members of Feith's Policy office delivered in summer-fall 2002 to Secretary Rumsfeld, CIA Director Tenet and White House officials including Steve Hadley and Scooter Libby, the Defense Department Inspector General Thomas Gimble found on February 9, 2007 that Feith's office did nothing unlawful, unauthorized or that attempted to mislead Congress But, the Policy briefing's criticisms of the CIA's intelligence work were found by Gimble to be "inappropriate" because they were "inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community."
The Policy briefing in question "did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers", Gimble argued, at a time when the White House was moving toward war with Iraq.
According to the Washington Post, Feith's "office had asserted in a briefing given to Cheney's chief of staff in September 2002 that the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was 'mature' and 'symbiotic,' marked by shared interests and evidenced by cooperation across 10 categories, including training, financing and logistics. Instead, the CIA had concluded in June 2002 that there were few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives. The contrary conclusions reached by Feith's office – and leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine before the war were publicly praised by Dick Cheney as the best source of information on the topic, a circumstance the Pentagon report cites in documenting the impact of what it described as 'inappropriate' work."
In February 2007, Feith launched an Internet website, , following the Defense Department's Inspector General report on pre-war activities of the Pentagon's policy organization. The report, "spawned a lot of inaccurate commentary by politicians and misreporting by journalists," and Feith said he launched the website, "to provide accurate information and sound commentary on the IG report controversy. I will use it also to provide reliable news items and other material about the work of the policy organization during my tenure as Under Secretary."
Feith's undergraduate work at Harvard and National Security Council position under Professor Richard Pipes in the 1970s and 80's presages present-day controversy over intelligence critiques. At University, Feith was involved with "Team B" analysis: or critiques of existing intelligence. In the late 1970s, many American conservatives believed the Soviet Union was a qualitatively graver threat than US intelligence agencies believed. These fears later proved unfounded. Feith applied a similar ideological lens to existing intelligence regarding Iraq.
The response to the Inspector General's report has been determined along partisan lines.
Subordinate's involvement in the Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal
A subordinate of Feith's, Larry Franklin, was convicted, and sentenced to 12 years in Federal prison in 2005 for charges in an espionage scandal. Franklin was accused and convicted of passing classified information to an Israeli diplomat and Steven Rosen, an employee of the Israeli AIPAC lobby. A reporter for the Asia Times wrote in September 2004 that the ongoing FBI counter-espionage probe into improper transmission of classified information to AIPAC from 1999 to shortly before the 2003 Iraq Invasion could involve Feith. Feith has not publicly commented on the investigation. Franklin was one of 1,500 employees at Feith's Pentagon office, and officially worked six layers of bureaucracy beneath Feith. However, while leading the Office of Special Plans (OSP), Feith used Larry Franklin repeatedly for sensitive meetings involving foreign citizens, overseas.
According to The Guardian, Feith's office had an unconventional relationship with Israel's intelligence services:
- The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
- "None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels", said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
- The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.
Also in September 2004, writing in an op-ed for the Gulf News, Adel Safty, the UNESCO Chair of Leadership and President of the School of Government and Leadership, Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, writes, "the FBI may be pursuing the wrong guy. Franklin is working for a more fanatical supporter of Israel with a higher security clearance: Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith, in his support for the extremist elements of the Israel's Likud party, played a crucial role in getting the USA to wage war against Iraq, and is trying to get it to intervene against Iran. Feith's services and loyalty to the Israeli extremists make the FBI investigation of Franklin's spy activities pale in insignificance."
Feith has been defended by Frank Gaffney, the head of the Center for Security Policy and a Feith friend since they served together in the Reagan administration. Gaffney told the Philadelphia Inquirer, "To construe Doug as this sort of running dog of the Jewish state, a Zionist proxy in the Pentagon, is totally false and deeply offensive."
See also
Lobbying in the United States
Footnotes
Further reading
- a video of a talk by Douglas Feith 1hr and 42min.
- Vanity Fair editor Craig Unger on the development of the Office of Special Plans
- Special Plans: the blogs on Douglas Feith and the faulty intelligence that led to war by Allison Hantschel, Wilsonville, Oregon: William, James & Co., September 2005 ISBN 1-59028-049-0
- Deadly Dogma: How Neoconservatives Broke the Law to Deceive America by Smith, Grant F., Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2006, ISBN 0-9764437-4-0.
- Clear Ideas vs. Foggy Bottom by Melanie Kirkpatrick, The Wall Street Journal August 5, 2003, p. A8.
- White House Learned of Spy Probe in 2001 by Curt Anderson, Associated Press, September 3, 2004.
- Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh, New York: Harper Collins. 2004. ISBN 0-06-019591-6.
- Israel's Legitimacy in Law and History Feith, Douglas J., et al; ed. Siegel, Edward M.; assoc.ed. Barrekette, Olga; Proceedings of the Conference on International Law and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York, October 21, 1990), Sponsored by The Louis D. Brandeis Society of Zionist Lawyers, Center for Near East Policy Research, 1993, ISBN 0-9640145-0-5.
- by David Wurmser, 1996
- Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, ISBN 0-7432-5547-X.
- A Dangerous Appointment: Profile of Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense under Bush by James J. Zogby, Middle East Information Center, April 18, 2001
- Israeli Settlements: Legitimate, Democratically Mandated, Vital to Israel's Security and, Therefore, in U.S. Interest, The Center for Security Policy, Transition Brief No. 96-T 130, December 17, 1996
External links
Biographies
Editorials
Editorials and opinion columnists, in reverse chronological order:
- by Maureen Dowd, New York Times, December 12, 2007.
- , New York Sun editorial, February 12, 2007.
- by former senior CIA political analyst Kathleen Christison, Adbusters, May-June, 2007.
- by Thomas Jocelyn, April 13, 2007.
- by Rich Tucker, Townhall.com, March 9, 2007.
- , by Robert Blackwill and Ed Rogers, The Washington Times, March 8, 2007.
- , by Mario Loyola, National Review, February 27, 2007.
- , by Michael Barone, The Washington Times, February 19, 2007.
- , by Hugh Hewitt, abcnews.com, February 12, 2007.
- , Wall Street Journal editorial, February 12, 2007.
- , by Andrew McCarthy, National Review, February 9, 2007.
- , Wall Street Journal editorial, May 31, 2006.
- , Wall Street Journal editorial, October 25, 2004.
- by Jim Lobe, Asia Times, September 2, 2004.
- by Chris Suellentrop, Slate, Thursday, May 20, 2004.
- at NewsMeat, 1986-present.
Press releases and news articles
- by Julian Borger The Guardian, July 17, 2003
- by Jon Kyl, Republic Policy Committee, US Senate, February 7, 2006
- by U.S. Senate
- by Rumsfeld, Pentagon Auditorium, Washington, DC, Monday, August 8, 2005
- by The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the U.S.
- by Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 2005-05-09
- by D. Pierce Nixon, The Hoya, January 31, 2006
- by Caitlin Moran, The Hoya, February 9, 2006
- by Richard Sale, The Washington Times, August 24. 2004
- by Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, September 3, 2004
- by Larisa Alexandrovna, Raw Story, January 30, 2006
- by Bryan Bender, Boston Globe, August 31, 2004
- Mazzetti, Mark "". Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2005
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