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In an indication of their growing estrangement with the Bush administration, neoconservatives are slamming the White House for failing to stop what they describe as an antisemitic campaign to marginalize them being conducted by the CIA and the State Department. This view was outlined in a memo circulating among neoconservative foreign policy analysts in Washington. Obtained by the Forward, the memo criticizes the White House for not refuting press reports on the FBI's investigation of Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin that suggest wrongdoing on the part of Jewish officials at the Defense Department. "If there is any truth to any of...

Washington, D.C. - Michael Maloof was back in the game. He and another Pentagon aide, David Wurmser, drove the short distance from the Pentagon to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. It was early October, a good season in Washington, but Maloof’s nerves were on edge during the scenic ride along the tree-lined George Washington Parkway. snip Maloof was a legend within the Pentagon circle that tracked arms proliferation. His office was obscure, but it performed a crucial national security function. snip The Pentagon wanted years of intelligence reporting on al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran and other potential targets in the war...

Uncommon Knowledge Douglas Feith talks war policy. “Chapters 1-5”  FRIDAY, JUNE 20, 2008War Policy with Douglas Feith: Chapter 5 of 5Is the U.S. equipped to deal with national-security problems around the world? Feith says no, pointing out the antiquated organization of our entire security community as well as the ineffective mess that is the CIA. Of course, our national security ultimately depends on the people in charge. Feith rates a few of the bigger names. THURSDAY, JUNE 19, 2008War Policy with Douglas Feith: Chapter 4 of 5Feith describes how WMD in Iraq — or the lack thereof — changed everything....

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...

A Tale of Two Books   By Frank J. Gaffney Jr. FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, June 03, 2008 I don’t generally make a habit of disagreeing with Peggy Noonan.  She is after all, one of the most thoughtful, accomplished and influential wordsmiths of our time.  She is also a much-admired friend and colleague.In an essay published last week in the Wall Street Journal last weekend, however, Peggy offered what amounted to a defense of Scott McClellan’s new memoir of his years in the George W. Bush administration, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. To...

By DOUGLAS J. FEITH May 27, 2008; Page A21 In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq. President Bush no longer stressed Saddam's record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president's credibility that had already been...

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...

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...

So there I was, listening to a few of the major "architects" of the war in Iraq -- Paul Wolfowitz, formerly No. 2 man at the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld; Douglas J. Feith, formerly No. 3 man at the Pentagon under Rumsfeld; Peter Rodman, another former senior adviser to Rumsfeld; and Dan Senor, former senior adviser to Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). They had assembled at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., for a discussion of Feith's new book, "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism," but what they were...

Today I had a private conversation with Douglas Feith and Frank Gaffney Jr. It came about due to a conference call that was arranged by the Center for Security Policy of which the latter is the President. The subject of the call was Feith's recent book War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. Feith as you may recall was the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy on 911. As such he was in the thick of things. Of all the players in the planning of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, few were...

Douglas Feith has been much maligned by Iraq war opponents. In advance of his book release last Tuesday, 60 Minutes ran an interview with Feith, one of the architects of the Iraq War, last Sunday. I was at a weekend festival and missed it; but thanks to the wonders of the internet as well as CBS 60 Minutes now making their video archives embeddable, here is the interview: **Video on site** This is the only time that I can recall 60 Minutes conducting a book-release interview that was not by an anti-Administration author or by someone who appears to be...

The war over Iraq – not to be confused with the conflict actually taking place there – is back in the headlines. This week's report to Congress by America's top two emissaries in Baghdad, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, will provide a backdrop for the momentous decisions to come concerning whether and how to pursue victory in Iraq. Before the politicians and their constituents make such decisions about where we go from here, they should be sure to ground themselves in the facts about how we got to this point. After all, as George Santayana put it, "Those...

March 19, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Facts for FeithCPA history. By L. Paul Bremer III A recent article in the Washington Post previewed the forthcoming book by former undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith. In his book Feith apparently alleges that I was responsible for what he calls the single biggest mistake the United States made in Iraq. He claims that I unilaterally abandoned the president’s policy, promoted by Feith and others before the war, to grant sovereignty to a group of Iraqi exiles immediately after Saddam’s defeat. On March 16, Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute elaborated on this...

Pentagon insider attacks war plan A former Pentagon official has written a book attacking Colin Powell, the CIA and other US officials over the US-led Iraq war, the Washington Post reports. As under secretary of defence until 2005 Douglas Feith was closely involved with the planning of the invasion. However, in "War and Decision", he blames officials outside the Pentagon for seriously mismanaging the invasion and occupation, the Post reports. Out next month, it is the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making. The newspaper says that Mr Feith accuses intelligence officials and the US state department, led at the time...

Claim: Iraq invasion was botched From correspondents in Washington March 10, 2008 02:30am Article from: Agence France-Presse A former Pentagon official who played a key role in planning the US-led war in Iraq has written a new book accusing former top diplomat Colin Powell, the CIA and other colleagues of botching the invasion and occupation of Iraq, The Washington Post reported today. Douglas Feith, who served as under secretary of defence for policy until 2005, alleges Mr Powell as secretary of state "downplayed" the degree and urgency of Iraq's threat but was never willing to openly oppose the invasion, the...

In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country. Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush's policies. Among the disclosures made by Feith in "War and Decision," scheduled...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A former Pentagon analyst who gave classified information to an Israeli diplomat and two members of a pro- Israel lobbying group was sentenced Friday to more than 12 years in prison. Lawrence A. Franklin, 59, had worked with top Pentagon officials, including former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith, and has expertise on Iraq and Iran. He pleaded guilty in October to three felony counts in exchange for three other counts being dropped. In sentencing Franklin, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III said the facts of the case led him to believe that Franklin was motivated...

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...

Mr. Tenet's account of all this gives the reader no idea of the substance of our critique, which was that the CIA's analysts were suppressing information. They were not showing policy makers reports that justified concern about ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. Mr. Tenet does tell us that the CIA briefed Mr. Cheney on Iraq and al Qaeda in September 2002 and that the "briefing was a disaster" because "Libby and the vice president arrived with such detailed knowledge on people, sources, and timelines that the senior CIA analytic manager doing the briefing that day simply could not compete."...

A few months ago, a long-awaited investigation into former Undersecretary of Defense, Doug Feith and his Office of Special Plans was finally concluded. (Dept of Defense Inspector General Report) The Department of Defense had been asked by Democrats in Congress to see if Feith and/or his office had done anything illegal in their investigation and reports regarding the depth of ties between Al Queda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. The Department of Defense’s interim Inspector General said essentially that Feith and his office had acted inappropriately by giving the impression that they were an intelligence agency, but that they had not...