Thinkprogress has a report via the American Conservative that indicates that former Pentagon Official Douglas Feith (aka the Dumbest Fucking Guy on the Planet) was responsible for the forged Habbush letter falsely linking Iraq to 9-11.

From Phillip Giraldi at the AC:

An extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community has informed me that Ron Suskind’s revelation that the White House ordered the preparation of a forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and also to attempts made to obtain yellowcake uranium is correct but that a number of details are wrong.

Continued over flip...

So asks McClatchy Newspapers ("Truth to Power") Washington Bureau reporter, John Walcott:

WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

[Stephen Cambone], however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator. [emphasis added]

Recent Bush Administration mutterings about an enduring "Status of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) between the US and Iraq, together with the still-pending passage of a new "Oil Law" in Iraq, inspires the following:

There have been several reports today that Iranian boats supposedly harrassed US warships in the Straits of Hormuz.

"WASHINGTON (AP) - In what U.S. officials called a serious provocation, Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats harassed and provoked three U.S. Navy ships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, threatening to explode the American vessels.

In the last few days, it's come to light that Gen. Petraeus was the original source for incorrect information released to the U.S. media in May 2003 that mobile biological warfare trailers had been located in Iraq.  False intelligence findings were indeed substituted for a 122-page DIA report suppressed by the Pentagon.

During the next year, the Bush-Cheney Administration continued to make false assertions that Saddam Hussein had a biotoxins  program in place before the invasion, and that certain trailers found in Iraq proved that claim.

We now learn that a team of Defense Intelligence Agency investigators concluded on May 26 that the trailers found had no connection to a biowarfare program, but, nonetheless, Pentagon spokesmen and the Administration continued to make unfounded allegations that the mobile labs had been manufacturing anthrax, smallpox, and other deadly germs.

Gen. Petraeus appears to have taken no steps to correct the record after he stated to reporters on May 13 that there is a "reasonable degree of certainty that this is in fact a mobile biological agent production trailer."

We should all ask why this part of Petraeus' history has been glossed over. Why has Congress and the media not pointed this out about the General before?  

"It is house to house, block to block, street to street, sewer to sewer," said Brigadier-General Mick Bednarek, commander of Operation Arrowhead Ripper in Iraq's Diyala province.

June 22, 2007

Welcome to General Hoar's Nightmare.  It's been almost five years in coming and it's not quite what we expected.  But it's here.  Wakey ...wakey....

File under "Creating Your Own Reality":

TPM Muckraker has obtained a declassified version of the slide presentation
used by Douglas "Fucking Stupidest Guy on the Planet" Feith, head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, to brief the National Security Council and the Office of the Vice-President (the real Decider, apparently) on the link between Al Qaeda and Saddam's Iraq.

Steve Clemons reports today that "Defense Secretary Robert Gates has told a number of senior national security officials -- current and former -- that he is shutting down (or at least significantly shrinking) the Rumsfeld-Cambone-Feith-Boykin intelligence operation."

Bob Gates is about to shut down a significant chunk of Vice President Cheney's intelligence eyes and ears -- and to some degree, an inappropriate ability to help drive covert actions.

Clemons, who's tracked the "significant rivalry between Rumsfeld and Cambone on one side and then Deputy DNI Michael Hayden and DNI John Negroponte on another," bases his optimism on today's National Journal article, "Rolling Back Pentagon Spies."

I don't know if this has been diaried before. If so, I will delete.

We are dancing around the real issue with Wilson/Plame.

The real issue outlined by Dave Lindorff .. here

Now maybe special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and what passes for journalists in the mainstream media can get down to the real business of finding out

...

... meeting occurred in December 2001 in Rome, and included Michael Ledeen, an associate of Defense Department Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith and a key figure in the White House's war-propaganda program, Larry Franklin, a top Defense Intelligence Agency Middle East analyst who later pleaded guilty to passing classified information to two employees of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), convicted Iraqi bank swindler Ahmed Chalabi, then head of the CIA-created Iraqi National Congress, and Harold Rhode of the sinister Defense Department Office of Special Plans, that office set up by the White House and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ...

In a new article on Afterdowningstreet.org former Pentagon Offical Lt. Col Karen Kwiatkowski, whose been extremely outspoken on the subject of the Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans where the Iraq War was ginnied up, makes a series of statements that perhaps many of us would enjoy taking to heart.

There is no doubt in my mind that Feith, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, as well as Abe Shulsky should have been (or in the case of Abe Shulsky, still in the Pentagon – be) formally impeached for incompetence, neglect of and disregard for national security, and reckless malfeasance in the conduct of their duties. Impeachment and prosecution for criminal misconduct while holding public office is certainly appropriate in these cases.

More over flip...

There's something just a little bit odd about the latest NIE on Iraq. I don't mean the fact (helpfully omitted from news reports last week) that the Bush administration held back its release for months—after failing to produce a new NIE for years. I'm more struck by how calculated and manipulative the unclassified version of this document is. The Key Judgments (the only part declassified) is so incomplete and vague that it must be giving us a grossly misleading picture of what the full NIE has to say.

We've been here before, with the notorious NIE from 2002. And yet, almost as if Bush & Co. had not manipulated public perception of Iraq during the last go round, once again most reporters greeted the unclassified version as if it were a straightforward summary of the intelligence on Iraq. But it is in fact a highly rhetorical document, and far from candid, as a few moments of thought would have shown.

by
Larry C Johnson (bio/blog)

Dougie Feith appeared on Faux News Sunday with Chris Wallace today and emphatically denied that he or anyone in his office ever said there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.  How sad.  Mr. Feith apparently has early on-set Alzheimer's disease.  He's forgotten that someone in his shop at DOD leaked his October 2003 memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee to one Mr. Stephen Hayes, an enterprising journalist, who in turn published the breathless findings in the Weekly Standard.  

So what?  The Weekly Standard is not an official government publication.  Why should we take it seriously?  Well, let's ask Vice President Dick Cheney.  Here's what the Weekly Standard Editor, a guy named Bill Kristol, wrote three years ago:

Editor's Note, 1/27/04: In today's Washington Post, Dana Milbank reported that "Vice President Cheney . . . in an interview this month with the Rocky Mountain News, recommended as the 'best source of information' an article in The Weekly Standard magazine detailing a relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda based on leaked classified information."

We are now being told that Iran is meddling in Iraq and is "helping insurgents".  While the government doesn’t know whether it should release the information, it wants us to trust them.  Trust them about evidence that National Security Advisor Steven Hadley said is "overstated".  That we should trust new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, because he says the evidence is "pretty good".

This, from the same man who was under investigation for lying about the Iran-contra crimes.

Once again, Walter Pincus has laid out the damning facts, this time on Feith's Office of Special Plans historic con, via "the disappearing-reappearing slide."  

Pincus describes two presentations, one given to the CIA, the other to the White House.  In the one given to the White House, Douglas Feith adds a concluding slide:

For the CIA briefing, Gimble said, Feith removed a slide concluding that there were "fundamental problems with the way the intelligence community was assessing the information." Gimble said that Feith told the inspector general's office he had taken it out "because it was critical of the intelligence community." The slide was reinserted for the later White House briefing.

MORE BELOW . . .

The recently released report of the Department of Defense Inspector General (I.G.) on the manipulation of pre-Iraq invasion intelligence stinks like a junkyard's worth of burning tires.  

Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story published the two page executive summary of the report on Friday morning.  The summary condemns the now infamous Office of Special Plans (OSP), the neoconservative cabal within the Pentagon that shaped intelligence on Iraq to suit the Bush administration's policy.  But it also lets the OSP off the hook, and tells everybody to look the other way.

Doug Feith talked to Wolf Blitzer today in the Situation Room. He came to defend his role in the production of intelligence assessments that were meant to push the professional intelligence community to concede that there was an Iraq-al-Qaeda connection before the US invasion of Iraq. It looked to me like at some point Wolf made him sweat, so this is a preview of what will happen to him when he goes testifying before Levin, or Rockefeller on the activities of his OSP.

Lets start with a key portion of the interview, right below the fold...

I will delete if this PDF has already been posted. It contains questions from Carl Levin and the DOA Inspector General's reponses. Here it is.

Sometimes you just have to wonder whether we are truly living in Wonderland.  If the Deputy Secretary of Defense has some kind of pet theory that Saddam Hussein has been behind al-Qaeda ever since the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and that he was behind the Oklahoma City bombing, and he sets up a shop in the Pentagon to investigate that pet theory, and he sends former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey to England to investigate that theory, it is not illegal for his underlings to carry out his orders.  But who cares?  Paul Wolfowitz is still crazy.  He still got 600,000 Iraqis killed and 20,000 Americans wounded.