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.
The Pentagon’s Inspector General has looked into the activities of Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans during 2002-3 and deemed those activities ‘inappropriate’ but ‘not illegal’. Well, no shit. It’s not illegal to be fucking crazy, but it sure is inappropriate to hire crazy people to run the most powerful killing machine in the history of mankind. Thanks a lot for that clarification, Inspector General.
As for the legality of disseminating intelligence reports without dissenting views attached, that can get kind of tricky. Obviously it goes against all standard practice in the area of intelligence. It’s a bad idea and should never, ever be done. And if it is done, no one should take the product seriously and they should go to the press and reveal that crazed bloodthirsty bastards have taken over a segment of the government and are going to get upwards of a million innocent people killed if someone doesn’t stop them.
It’s a shame that they waited until May 2003 to go to the press. By then it was too late. Regardless, there is probably no law against issuing or obeying orders to disseminate really lame intelligence reports based on totally unreliable sources like the Iraqi National Congress. What could be illegal, however, is setting up an intelligence gathering operation and not telling Congress about it, as Jay Rockefeller explains:
…the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, said in a statement that because the inspector general considered the work of Mr. Feith’s group to be “intelligence activities,” the committee would investigate whether the Pentagon violated the National Security Act of 1947 by failing to notify Congress about the group’s work.
Whatever. We should just put Wolfowitz and Feith on a slow boat to the Hague where they don’t need to concern themselves with the niceties of Pentagon protocol or upsetting chest-beating Republicans by calling a war criminal a spade.
Sen. Carl Levin will be convening a hearing of the Armed Services Committee at 9:30 AM eastern time. It should be on either C-SPAN-2 or C-SPAN-3. You will see friendly faces there like Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Lindsey Graham. And let’s not forget the nuclear scientists and brain surgeons Inhofe, Sessions, and Cornyn…they’ll be there too. Doing that oversight thing. Should be a blast.
We can talk about how ‘inappropriate’ the Iraq War is. We can all agree it wasn’t illegal because the Pwezidunt ordered up the killing. Never mind that lunatics like Wolfowitz, Cheney, Feith, Bolton, and Rumsfeld were cooking the monkey’s intelligence reports. That’s not illegal. And the chimp in charge probably started the ball rolling anyway by declaring Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out before developing a plan, establishing a legal basis, consulting our allies, or asking for the intelligence community’s assessments. The motherfucker didn’t even know the difference between a Shi’ite and a Sunni until the eve of the war.
Inappropiate. Pfft.
