Feith's lies

Juan Cole has the skinny on Doug Feith's three massive lies on Wolf Blitzer's "The Situation Room" last night. I was watching and almost threw a brick through the TV. If I'd had a brick handy, I probably would have. Here's Cole on the first lie:

BLITZER: Did you and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney and Scooter Libby and the president make a mistake?

FEITH: Well, I mean, in the -- lots of mistakes were made and lots of right things were done.

BLITZER: In your analysis?

FEITH: The issue here was not that we did an analysis. The issue was we criticized the CIA's analysis.
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Feith's "Office of Special Plans" did not just critique Central Intelligence Agency conclusions. It requisitioned raw intelligence and cherry-picked it for the conclusions Feith was seeking. And, the group itself was not neutral analysts but was rather drawn from the Neoconservative network close to Israel's Likud Party:

Jim Lobe wrote, "The heads of NESA and OSP were Deputy Undersecretary William Luti and Abram Shulsky, respectively. Other appointees who worked with them in both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-con icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of pro-Likud 'Jerusalem Post'; and Chris Lehman, the brother of the John Lehman, a prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski."

Feith decries the "filter" the CIA had put on its intelligence on Iraq. Mr. Feith, that is called "intelligence analysis." Raw, undigested tips are not intelligence and they can be extremely unreliable if not weighted properly. It then funneled those conclusions to Cheney's office directly, by-passing real intelligence agencies. Its members also quite illegally briefed high ranking administration officials on the intelligence. See my earlier remarks on all this.