This is one of the most tortured excuses I have ever seen.
Douglas J. Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy, sharply disputed the inspector general’s conclusions in a series of interviews yesterday. “My office was trying to prevent an intelligence failure,” Feith told National Public Radio. “We had people in the Pentagon who thought that the CIA’s speculative assessments were not of top quality; they were not raising all the questions they should raise and considering all the information they should consider.”
His office “did not present an alternative intelligence analysis,” Feith said, it “presented a criticism.”
Consider the irony here. When they didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction intelligence officers starting leaking like crazy about how Rumsfeld and Cheney cooked the intelligence. The first major hit came on May 5, 2003 when Sy Hersh broke the story of Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans. It used Patrick Lang as a source. The next day Nicholas Kristof published Missing in Action: The Truth which used Ambassador Wilson as an anonymous source and Patrick Lang as an on-the-record source. It was pretty clear that the intelligence community, the responsible intelligence community, was not going to take the blame for no WMD lying down. And that is when Mary Matalin and Scooter Libby and Karl Rove and Dan Batlett and Ari Fleischer and a host of Republican-owned pundits all banded together to fight off any attacks on the administration. This ultimately culminated with Ambassador Wilson going public on July 6 and Rove/Novak outing his wife on the 14th.
In the meantime, DCI George Tenet, who is hardly blameless in this whole debacle, had to take the blame for the 16 words in the State of the Union address. So, the case for war which was made by Douglas Feith was “not [an] alternative intelligence analysis,” but merely a “criticism” of the CIA’s intelligence estimates. And when it all turned out to be crap, the CIA had to take the blame.
And when the CIA wasn’t initially cooperative they outed a covert officer in an act of pure spite and intimidation.
And as the final insult, they gave George Tenet a medal of freedom.
This was all very inappropriate.
