LIght amid the darkness: Feith out

Every force ten hurricane has a silver lining... John 'Let's nuke North Korea' Bolton's already gone and now it's the turn of Doug Feith (Juan Cole's roundup, BBC report). Doug Feith was the no. 3 at the Pentagon under Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and ran the sinisterly named 'Office of Special Plans' which basically 'stove piped' incredibly dodgy 'intelligence' about Iraq up to the President (and from there to Blair it would seem).

Feith was also somehow responsible for post-war 'planning' in Iraq. Which was possibly what led General Tommy Franks to call him "the stupidest fucking guy on the face of the earth" (Plan of Attack, p281). He is also known as a paid-up Zionist and there are some suspicions that he was involved in passing information to the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Most amusing of all Feith-related incidents was his interview with John Pilger on his Breaking the Silence film - he obviously didn't have a clue who Pilger was:

PILGER: Isn't there a problem for us in the West of honesty about the reason for going to war in Iraq — and that was weapons of mass destruction?

FEITH: I don't think that was a lie. We went to war in large part because of the concern that weapons of mass destruction in the ... in the hands of the Saddam Hussein regime ... a regime that used such weapons ... in particular nerve gas...

PILGER: ... and was supplied by the United States and Britain with these weapons of mass destruction ...

FEITH: No, I don't believe that's accurate.

PILGER: Well, yes they were. Most, most of the weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein weren't built by him. The machine tools and the ingredients for his biological weapons all came from other countries, many of them from this country and Britain.

FEITH: I don't think that's right. I think, I really think that the...

PILGER: Well, it's on the record...

FEITH: Well...

PILGER: ... in the Library of Congress...

FEITH: I think that... I think that the premise of your question is wrong.

Pilger minced him good and proper on a number of other issues too and Feith's army minder standing behind the cameraman had to stop the interview.