Dougie Feith’s Little Shop of Tortures?
I just happened to find Dougie Feith’s responses to Questions for the Record the Senate Intelligence Committee asked him in 2003. They wanted to know how his little intelligence shop at DOD–the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG)–bridged the line between intelligence and policy.
He said his little intelligence shop helped formulate policy on:
- DoD response to the presence in Iraq of the al-Qaida affiliated Ansar al-Islam terrorist group.
- DoD response to the presence in Iraq of al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his CB W network.
- Helping to formulate requirements for the debriefings of al-Qaida fighters detained at Guantanamo and Bagram.
"Helping to formulate requirements for the debriefings of al-Qaida fighters?!?!?!?!"
What the hell does that mean? How do you formulate policy requirements for interrogations?
I don’t know, really, but I wonder if it has something to do with this (from a psychiatrist advising on interrogations at Gitmo):
[T]his is my opinion, even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between AI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between AI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link, there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.
Or this, coming from Dougie’s boss, Paul Wolfowitz:
Mr. Becker also told the Committee that, on several occasions, MG Dunlavey had advised him that the office of Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz had called to express concerns about the insufficient intelligence production at GTMO.
Or this:
Mr. Haynes’s memo stated that he had discussed the issue with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary ofDefense for Policy Doug Feith, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) General Richard Myers and that they concurred with his recommendation.
Anyone want to speculate whether or not Dougie Feith was giving the torturers a script to focus on Iraq’s specious ties to al Qaeda?
Updated for clarity.
OMG! Your Sleuthiness! Dougie admits torture for al Queda/Iraq link.
This is another 183 catch.
This is indeed a fine catch.
I hope everyone knows dougie is fish bait for the Spanish sharks, one of the Garzon ’six’ along with Fredo, Haynes, Bybee, Yoo, and Addington.
What Douglas Feith knew and when he know it”
http://www.newyorker.com/archi…..509fa_fact
Tommy Franks tells him (according to insider accounts), … Page 281: On Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy: “I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day.
——-
We never have witnessed anyone held accountable for all of that false pre war intelligence. Oh yeah “move forward” forget the unnecessary deaths
Heh, heck that isn’t even speculation is it?
In all seriousness, you know how I have been whining about the obliteration of the good faith for the torture regime? Well, here is yet another dagger in the heart of that. Just days ago we were talking about the ridiculousness of letting Mitchell, who had never even done an interrogation before, lead the inquisition effort. That was bad enough, but letting Doug Feith have substantive input into protocols??? Wow.
Um, OF COURSE he had substantive input. That’s why the military was bitching about him in the first place. He got the “fucking stupidest guy” title BECAUSE he had the power to shape policy. If he’d been some bozo they could just ignore, I don’t think he would have been annoying enough for them to bother complaining about him.
And wasn’t it four and five star Generals and Admirals complaining about him?
Rumsfeld was forcing them to sit through his prattle about how Saddam must have secretly smuggled all his WMD’s into Syria using the Russian embassy vehicles.
Well he is one of the suspects being investigated by the Spanish court, si?
Great work as always.
A nitpick – your second line should be his little intelligence shop (or maybe ho’s?).
Correct, it should. Thanks.
I would also be interested in Karen Kwiatkowski as a source. Additionally, the legal text on torture I emailed about…I wonder if there are any contributing authors who may have ties to Feith?
(my emphasis)
Sounds like orders…those words get repeated a great deal by many.
Thanks for your work.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66622.html
When the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense order the interrogators to employ torture to force false confessions out of the prisoners to falsely establish a linkage that does not exist as a pretext to launch an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation – well, let’s just all be thankful for the Spanish Inquisition – Part Deux.
Have read and listened to about everything Kwatowski has written or said
“The New Pentagon Papers”
From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it.
I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.
I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.
While this commandeering of a narrow segment of both intelligence production and American foreign policy matched closely with the well-published desires of the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike, felt that this agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been openly presented to the American people. Instead, the public story line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses, and a war one year later Americans do not really understand. That is why I have gone public with my account.
————————————————————————–
Doug Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, was a case study in how not to run a large organization. In late 2001, he held the first all-hands policy meeting at which he discussed for over 15 minutes how many bullets and sub-bullets should be in papers for Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A year later, in August of 2002, he held another all-hands meeting in the auditorium where he embarrassed everyone with an emotional performance about what it was like to serve Rumsfeld. He blithely informed us that for months he didn’t realize Rumsfeld had a daily stand-up meeting with his four undersecretaries. He shared with us the fact that, after he started to attend these meetings, he knew better what Rumsfeld wanted of him. Most military staffers and professional civilians hearing this were incredulous, as was I, to hear of such organizational ignorance lasting so long and shared so openly. Feith’s inattention to most policy detail, except that relating to Israel and Iraq, earned him a reputation most foul throughout Policy, with rampant stories of routine signatures that took months to achieve and lost documents. His poor reputation as a manager was not helped by his arrogance. One thing I kept hearing from those defending Feith was that he was “just brilliant.” It was curiously like the brainwashed refrain in “The Manchurian Candidate” about the programmed sleeper agent Raymond Shaw, as the “kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known.”
——————————————————————————–
Kwiatowski “I thought of him when I read much later about the 2002 and 2003 meetings between Michael Ledeen, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar — all Iran-Contra figures.”
Had not remembered that Reuel Marc Gerecht had been at those meetings
———————————————————————
Karen talks about the steady stream of people who came and went from the Office of Special Plans, Micheal Rubin, Michaeal Makovsy, Bill Bruner (Chalabi’s handler), Bill Luti
—————————————-
The New Pentagon Papers is worth reading again
Feith and Perle and defense contracts (hanky panky with Turkey)
http://www.mediamonitors.net/zogby9.html
Is Zogby right that all of this is “distasteful” it is not “illegal”
In 1989, Feith registered International Advisors Inc. (IAI) as a foreign agent representing the government of Turkey. In official documents, one of the stated purposes of the work of IAI was to “promote the objective of U.S.-Turkish defense industrial cooperation.”
The move was heralded in the Turkish press as creating a “warmer atmosphere” between Turkey and conservative members of Congress and “the strong Jewish lobby in the United States.” It was thought that these relationships would help Turkey’s military ties and sales to the United States.
IAI was described in both the United States and Turkish press as Perle’s brainchild. The Wall Street Journal, reported in early 1989 on the creation of IAI as follows:
“Richard Perle, who among other things supervised U.S. military assistance to Turkey during his recent seven-year hitch in the Pentagon, has created a company in Washington to lobby for Turkey.
The company, International Advisors Inc., is headed by three men, including two who worked under Mr. Perle at the Defense Department. According to a statement the company filed with the Justice Department, it will ‘assist in the efforts for the appropriation of U.S. military and economic assistance’ to Turkey.”
Perle, however disputed this claim saying that IAI was not his group. He claimed that he was merely an “advisor.” He further noted “I find very distasteful this business where people leave the government and the next thing you know, they’re on the other side of the table negotiating with the U.S.”
And in a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, Perle elaborated his position by stating “I have not created a company to lobby for Turkey….The firm to which the story refers, International Advisors, Inc., was created by Douglas Feith, a Washington attorney. I am not a stockholder, director, officer or employee of the firm. I will not lobby for nor represent the government of Turkey. I will chair an advisory board that is only now being formed.”
In fact, in the official documents filed with the U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Foreign Agents Registration Unit, Douglas Feith is listed as the Chief Executive Officer of IAI and its only stockholder.
However, in semiannual reports filed by IAI during its 1989-1994 tenure, Richard Perle is listed as the single highest paid consultant to the group earning $48,000 each year. Feith, himself earned $60,000 per year and his law firm, Feith and Zell, received hundreds of thousands of dollars from IAI.
http://www.mediamonitors.net/zogby9.html
Here’s that link that I emailed on the 27th from Oxford Press.
There’s only one problem w/this theory: DoD didn’t have control over the interrogations. CIA did.
It was the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (CIA/CTC) that had custody over the key 9/11 al-Qaeda detainees who were tortured most severely — KSM, Abu Zubyadeh, and al-Nashiri — and it was CIA/CTC that carried out the waterboarding. And, it was the leadership of CTC who had their own reasons for wanting to waterboard these particular detainees and “change their brains”. See, http://journals.democraticunde…..eveymg/337
These detainees weren’t transferred to DoD GITMO until 2006-07.
Yes, no doubt Dougie Feith and Wolfie had something to do with policy formulation at DoD PCTEG. Undoubtedly, they wanted to produce intel linking 9/11 to Iraq. Of course, they didn’t get it. Lawyers in DoD’s General Counsel’s Office, particularly Haynes, were also guilty as hell, as were Yoo and the DOJ Policy Office crew, in laying the “legal” groundwork. But, really, it was CIA/CTC who had control over and carried out the worst of the abuses of the key 9/11 figures.
– Mark
DOD and CIA knew for a fact that “confessions” coerced by torture were VERY likely to be false confessions. John McCain knew it too.
Cheney and Rumsfeld knew it. The logical explanation is that they called for these individuals to be tortured for the specific purpose of obtaining false confessions to be used in the mainstream media to “justify” their planned invasion. This also explains why they insisted the sessions be video taped, so they would have footage to air on the “news” of the alleged terrorist “confessing” the Iraqi connection to 9/11.
It’s exceptionally simple, really. The reason for the torture mandate was to obtain coerced false information to fit the “agenda.” It had nothing whatsoever to do with any imminent terror threat, and the administration (the real terrorists) knew it. The “ticking time bomb” scenario that FOX News and others toss out as a justification for torture is a total red herring.
Occams Razor suggests that the primary reason for the torture was to obtain false confessions. It appears a secondary reason for the type of torture employed was humiliation and degradation. Period.
It’s easy to reach your conclusion.
However, FWIW, it has always appeared from my very distant view that Feith really, truly believed that there were links, and that he had to help find them. Therein lies a tragedy of a different nature.
Not excusing Feith, nor letting him off the hook.
But it also seems that if someone wanted to ‘play’ the neocons for fools, their blunderheaded True Beliefs would have been easy to play.
Note Chalabi’s involvement.
Who’s he playing? And why?
And how did Ahmad Chalabi become the Iraqi Oil Minister in Dec 2005?
With all due respect, and although I salute your persistence and have zero corner on any kind of ‘truth’, nor any inside track on what happened here, to simply ‘blame Israel’, although on some levels it appears some responsibility lies that direction, appears profoundly and severely incomplete.
To believe that, I’d have to assume that Chalabi is an Israeli agent.
FWIW, that seems preposterous.
There are levels here that I don’t see, nor do I understand.
Thanks for your response. Chalabi is an agent of the CFR and David Rockefeller. His picture is said to have hung on the wall there in earlier years. The distinction between Israel and the United States in regard to him is a distinction without a difference. The CFR and all the various think tanks (to say nothing of the entire US Congress it seems) perceive these two countries to be one and the same – serving the interest of the Crown, the Military Industrial Complex, Banking and Oil – and therein lies the problem.
My take from the outset on what I perceive to be a massive conspiracy is that the David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, GHW Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ken Lay etc. (CFR) contingent (essentially the Shadow Government of the United States), elected to enter into a conspiracy with the Likud party and Mossad, which includes all of their inside operatives positioned throughout the US Government. I perceive that the Lewinsky affair with Clinton was the opening salvo in this particular incarnation of the conspiracy. Sexpionage and blackmail are evident from the blow job forward. Chandra Levy was just another Swallow – and Cheney had her eliminated (assassination team).
In the aftermath of 9/11, when the official conspiracy fantasy started to fall apart owning largely to the multiple errors that occurred on that day, Israel began blackmailing their counterparts in the US Congress and Bush Administration. When parties are co-conspirators in a massive crime, he who cares the least controls. The leaders in the US simply had more to lose than those in Israel, and Israel has been blackmailing the hell out of the Shadow Government of this country for the past four years.
Feith put his loyalty to Zionism over his loyalty to the United States – that much is clear – regardless of how smart, stupid or involved he may have been in the actual implementation of the multiple counts of Treason.
BMAZ: Please note that I’m posting this in direct response to a question asked of me. I know you disagree with everything that I post (despite many links which support my assertions). Thank you.
I find it quite easy to believe that that Chalabi was an Israeli agent at some point or at least allied with those working for Israel as his influence is obvious in the Iraq section of the 1996 Clean Break paper prepared by Perle and Feith for Netanyahu. This following is part of a recent comment by David Habakkuk at Patrick Lang’s place:
‘In the section on Iraq, and the necessity of removing Saddam Hussein, there was telltale “intelligence” from Chalabi and his old Jordanian Hashemite patron, Prince Hassan: “The predominantly Shi’a population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shi’a leadership in Najaf, Iraq, rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najaf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shi’a away from Hizbollah, Iran, and Syria. Shi’a retain strong ties to the Hashemites.” Of course the Shia with “strong ties to the Hashemites” was the family of Ahmed Chalabi. Perle, Feith and other contributors to the “Clean Break” seemed not to recall the 15-year fatwa the clerics of Najaf proclaimed against the Iraqi Hashemites. Or the still more glaring fact, pointed out by Rashid Khalidi in his new book “Resurrecting Empire,” that Shiites are loyal only to descendants of the prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali, and reject all other lineages, including the Hashemites. As Khalidi caustically notes, “Perle and his colleagues were here proposing the complete restructuring of a region whose history and religion their suggestions reveal they know hardly anything about.” In short, the Iraqi component of the neocons “new strategy” was based on an ignorant fantasy of prospective Shia support for ties with Israel.’
Subsequently, Chalabi changed tack, and abandoned the fantasy of sorting out Israel’s problems through Hashemite control of Iraq for the fantasy that the Iraqi Shia were secular, so that an Iraqi democracy, to be headed by Chalabi, would not only be a natural ally of Israel and the U.S., but a dagger pointed at the heart of the regime in Tehran.
At the same time he was explaining to his Muslim friends — as one of them recalled to Dizard — ‘that he just needed the Jews in order to get what he wanted from Washington, and that he would turn on them after that.’
(See http://dir.salon.com/story/new…..4/chalabi/)
http://turcopolier.typepad.com…..-iran.html
you know what? I think I went to HS with Dougie. really. he played the harp, too.
October 6, 2008 – Feith written response to question from Nadler:
(emphasis added)
That sounds curiously like Condi’s “The President determined that the techniques were not torture. If the President determines they weren’t torture they weren’t.”
“I did not recommend… I understood… I understood…” (used several times.)
That’s an interesting locution. Tell us, Dougie. How was it that you “understood”? And what are you trying to hide behind your back, there?
Bob in HI
BTW, has anyone tried to wade through Dougie’s memoir? It did, after all, get the Peggy Noonan Seal of Approval.
Not entirely OT. Just saw this:
http://www.google.com/hostedne…..QD9803BI84
Looks like the Spaniards aren’t quite ready to drop this.
Si, por supuesto.
Question 4.b.1 from Nadler:
Hey, there’s a new definition of nakedness: being detached from things that give one comfort. Your clothes, they’re just a security blanket, a pacifier. MAN UP, BE NAKED.
“I cannot offer an opinion about lawfulness; my office did not do legal analyses of these issues.”
Shorter “We were just following orders”.
Or how about this? They weren’t forced to be naked…they simply weren’t given clothes.
I wonder what Alito will say about this one? Will he again reminisce about those gleeful days of nakedness in the boys gym? “Forced nudity? What’s the problem…”
Ha! Here’s Dougie again with another “I understood…”
Hmmm. Is there a pattern of deception here?
Bob in HI
I don’t pretend to know anything about Islamic law, but per the excerpt from Karen Greenberg’s Least Worse Place that I quoted in a different thread, the original commander at GITMO had come up with undergarments that the inmates could wear in the showers, because of Islamic law prohibitions on nakedness.
So in addition to generalized humiliation, it had another level of degredation of their faith.
Is that the same woman who co-edited the Torture Papers with Joshua Dratel? If so, she said (speaking of undergarments) that as she was compiling all the papers, one of the things that struck her because it appeared everywhere so consistently, was putting women’s underwear on detainees’ heads. She’d never seen it done before, and suddenly here it was in the GWOT, used everywhere, which gave lie to “just a few bad apples” – how could it appear spontaneously everywhere at the same time if it was just bad apples.
Camel’s back; meet straw.
I generally find it useful to put EW’s revelations into the context of her timelines, and this one’s a doozie. I hope that this somewhat long excerpt from sections of two of her timelines will be indulged for the sake of putting Feith’s comments before the committee into a larger context of two timelines.
I’ve used italics for the Disappearing White House Emails Timeline and placed three asterisks in front of the entries from the:
*** The Ghorbanifar Meetings Timeline
*** February 12, 2003: Franklin and Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman discuss draft internal policy document regarding “Middle Eastern country”
March 2003: Starting date of period during which White House has incomplete archives for emails; from March to October, email archives and backup tapes are incomplete.
*** March 13, 2003: Rosen discloses information on policy document to “senior fellow” at DC think tank (Ledeen?)
*** March 17, 2003: Franklin faxes Rosen contents of appendix from internal policy document
*** March 18, 2003: Rosen leaks details of policy document to WaPo’s Michael Dobbs, saying “I’m not supposed to know this”
*** May 7, 2003: Rhode apparently stages “find” of anti-Israel materials in Iraq (and uranium document) with Ahmed Chalabi; Judy Miller reports it
*** Late May, 2003: Ledeen sends new letter outlining Ghorbanifar plan to Feith, including promise of finding “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that had been moved to Iran”
*** June 2, 2003: Feith forwards Ledeen letter to Cambone; “let’s discuss”
*** June 28, 2003: Feith writes letter to Pat Roberts on “the cell set up in his office to review intelligence”
*** August 27, 2004: News of AIPAC investigation leaked; Paul McNulty put in charge of case
*** August 29-20, 2004: Feith, Luti, Rodman interviewed about whether they had authorized Franklin’s leaks to AIPAC
*** August 2005: Feith leaves DOD
*** September 9, 2005: Roberts requests DOD IG investigation into “unlawful” activities of OUSD(P)
*** September 22, 2005: Levin requests DOD IG investigation into “improper” activities of OUSD(P)
October 2, 2003: DOJ requests White House turn over materials relating to Wilson, his Niger trip, Novak, Royce, and Phelps. No email archive of OVP emails.
October 3, 2003: Gonzales informs White House to turn over materials by October 7. No email archive of OVP emails.
October 5, 2003: Date on which Martin to Fleischer email printed out, apparently by Martin. It was originally written on July 7, 2003 and contained OVP talking points on Wilson for Fleischer to use in his press briefing, including the words, “Niger” and “Joe Wilson.” Probably turned over to DOJ on October 9, 2003. No email archive of OVP emails.
http://emptywheel.firedoglake&…..-timeline/
http://emptywheel.firedoglake&…..-timeline/
I’m sure we can all count on Rush Limbaugh to insist that there’s nothing here to fret over. So many missing emails; so much planted WMD… but nothing to see here, move right along…
My, my, thank you. Naked indeed. Wonder what the Magus’ favorite football team is? I might need to learn some cheers.
EW – Maybe you can clear this up?
Re: Ledeen letter to Feith that gets discussed with Cambone. Have not been able to find reference to such a letter anywhere other than in EW’s original and links to it. What, exactly, is the source of this letter?
I don’t have the answer, and Marcy will be out much of the day. Did you check the Ghorbanifar timeline that is linked on the right? It has many links. Sorry, that is the best I got.
Richard N. Haass wrote a book titled War of Necessity: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars. He was on Morning Joe earlier this week. He says that his book goes into the room with Colin Powell to look at all of the intelligence before Powell gave his UN speech about bioweapons labs on trucks.
I wonder what his book says about Feith.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036789/#30577604
Took some looking, but I found the source for the letter that Feith passed to Cambone re: alleged Iraq WMD moved to Iran.
It’s in a McClatchy story of June 5, 2008 on the release of a Senate Intelligence Committee Report into the going-on at OSP by Feith, Rhode, Cambone and their contacts with Ledeen and Ghorbanifar. There’s another interesting element here that has been scarcely remarked on, and that’s the embrace of this fabrication by then Sens. Gingrich, Kyle, Brownback and Santorum: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/ira…..40080.html
Wow, leveymg — what a catch! I have no recollection of reading that article, thanks for that link! Wow, that is sensationally good.
DalyBean @ 72, thanks also — your points underscore American ignorance on so much related to the Middle East. Combined with data on the extravagant sums of money that Republican administrations since Reagan have showered on Chalabi, it makes the McClatchy article [about Iranians punking the neocons into taking us into Iraq] that leveymg links to all the more resonant.
Here’s the link pp. 24-25 http://intelligence.senate.gov/080605/phase2b.pdf
You are a wonder.
I’d tried to read that when it came out; masaccio and several of us were commenting here and when I got to about page 18, I was so disgusted and horrified that I just stopped reading it.
Post-election, maybe I can give it another try.
I do recall that swinish comment by Ledeen about how he thought he’d ‘remembered reading in the newspapers’ about the meetings between Franklin and Ghorbanifar and G*d only knows who else that he’d set up himself.
Anyway, thanks for that link, as well as the McClatchy!
Leen @78: Over and above the wreckless destruction you reference, there is another layer: these idiots basically handed over America’s ass on a silver platter to people who do not mean us well. ‘Patriots’ is not a word that I would use to reference these clowns.
Yeah and when Phase II of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence finally finished that report that Republican Senator Pat Roberts did everything he could to delay and divert that investigation away from the OSP. Hardly anyone was looking.
Hell we have yet to witness anyone held for the false, cherry picked, and dessiminated false pre war intelligence that poured out of the Office of Specials plans. But what the hell only thousands…hundreds of thousands of people are dead, injured and millions displaced by the use of this false intelligence to convince the majority of American people to kind of support a war based on a “pack of lies” And what the hell most of those dead are Iraqi’s and they do not count in Feith, Cambone’s Bush, Cheney’s and some Americans books
Niger Documents anyone been held accountable for those. No. Just move forward, turn the page, move on says Obama and many of the other Dems
How soon will Dougie slink off across the pond to the country of his first loyalty whose name begins with an “I” and ends with an “L” and hope his hosts will find a way to avoid extraditing him?
Re #7, bmaz, about that ” . . whining about the obliteration of the good faith for the torture regime?” Let’s just say that the “good faith torture regime” was replaced with a “good feith torture regime.” (g)
G’nite all.
OT – Scrapple in the news.
It seems pretty obvious that Wolfowitz and Feith, as card carrying Neocons, had strong motivations to support Torturing for ‘the facts’ of an Al Qaeda-Iraq Connection that matched the claims of their DoD-based Neocon Propaganda Policy Shop.
Here are Hardcore Bush-Neocon Ideologues – occupying powerful Civilian Policy positions in DoD – directly weighing-in with Dunlavey down in Gitmo on the Need to get more intelligence out of the Detainees to support linking Al Qaeda to Iraq.
To have Civilian interference way down the normal Chain of Command like this would be highly abnormal – unless Dunlavey had a Classified, parallel Chain of Command (JTF-170?) that reported directly to Rumsfeld, and then on to Bush.
If that were the case, then one might expect to see Bush and Rumsfeld’s Neocon Civilian DoD Policy Wonks pressed up against the glass of Dunlavey’s closed office door, lobbying him Ideologically, and yelling, “Just do it! Bybee One makes it Legal! We ‘know’ Al Qaeda is in Iraq – now, give us the facts we need to prove it!”
I’d like to know more about Myers’ concurring with Haynes’ recomendations for the Harsh Interrogations to Rumsfeld, because anyone siding with Bybee One was clearly making a poorly informed, Ideological Choice for Bush the UE over the Constitution and the Rule of Law, as we know it.
If Myers caved-in to Bybee One, then we can only assume that Myers found the Wolfowitz/Feith claims of Al Qaeda in Iraq to be more convincing to him than the ’statutory’ Geneva Conventions.
A pressing question (my own) for lawyers: under what jurisdiction, or in what court of law, and under what statutes, criminal or civil, can these civilians be tried? This would require action by the Department of Justice, would it not? And if so, to what level must the evidence rise, such that the DoJ has no choice?
This is not a question about perjury, it’s a question about civilians ordering torture, regardless of whether their orders were followed by soldiers or civilian contractors. It’s a question about the remote, rather than the proximate, cause–up to, and including, of course, the presiding bush, junior.
At what point, in principle, must a Grand Jury investigate these guys–always assuming that torture is against the law?
Bingo. That’s why they were using SERE techniques on Al Qaeda…they were looking for an excuse to get the American public behind a war to seize Iraq’s oil…and to cow the American public into re-electing a war criminal as President. They apparently succeeded and have paid no more penalty–so far–for completely lawless behavior.
Excellent timeline.
I strongly recommend that EW contact Karen Kwiatkowski and interview her directly to ascertain who was really driving the strategy. She worked directly with many you’ve named above, and knows who these agents of influence actually worked for.
According to multiple interviews, she states flatly that during her time working at DOD in and around Feith’s Office Of Special Plans, she personally escorted Israeli Generals into Feith’s office for strategy meetings. She confirms that the comings and goings of Israeli top brass at the DOD were not recorded in the visitor logs – intentionally.
I think she will confirm on the record that these Israeli Generals were actually there to call the shots and plot all the strategy for the invasion of Iraq, the planting of evidence to justify the subsequent invasion of Iran, and yes, the torture policies and techniques as well – one of which was reported as US interrogators wrapping the Israeli flag around prisoners as an interrogation technique:
http://www.humanrightsblog.org…..03250.html
Americans don’t think of torture techniques that include draping Muslims in Israeli flags on their own. This tried and true interrogation (humiliation) technique has been used on Muslim prisoners in the past, by Israel. This interrogation policy was imposed from outside the DOD (I contend outside the US) – and it was Feith, Wurmser and Wolfowitz who provided the conduit with Ledeen working full time to ensure the grand strategy to create Eretz Israel was expedited.
The translation of the term “Neocon” is “Agent of Israel.” That’s clearly what Rhode, Wurmser, Feith, Libby and all the rest were – and what the entire administration became – using our troops and treasure to enable their conquest.
Tracing the approval of these torture techniques to the White House – while valuable – still does not reveal where the manual was written – or which General delivered it to the United States to the Office Of Special Plans in a diplomatic pouch.
I just noticed something in my own prior post within the FBI’s Guantanamo Bay Inquiry memo …
“saw d in interview room sitting on floor w/Israeli flag draped around him, loud music and strobe lights. W suspects this practice is used by DOD DHS based on who he saw in the hallway”
Note that this memo states that DHS agents were spotted in the hallway. DHS and DOD oversaw techniques that included prisoner humiliation with Israeli flags (a violation of Geneva and NOT consistent with DOD policy).
Include Mr. Chertoff on the list of agents of influence, for sure. Who delivered the flags to Guantanamo? Under whose orders? For what purpose?
The memo goes on to state:
Interesting that she chose to use the word “obnoxious,” when “humiliating” would have described the technique far more accurately. Because of what is detailed above, the Army had to retroactively rewrite its own interrogation manual in 2006:
http://articles.latimes.com/20…..a-torture5
Army Manual to Skip Geneva Detainee Rule
By Julian E. Barnes
June 05, 2006
The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans “humiliating and degrading treatment,” according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.
My post # 29 above references the May 2003 AEI forum featuring Ledeen as a guest speaker:
Look what readeroftealeaves time line posted at #16 reveals in the exact same time frame:
The article linked herein is required reading.
On the face of it, that is delusional. I know, I know — how can I still be shocked? But it sure sounds as though Feith, at least, actually believed the stuff he made up himself.
I wonder whether we can find that hearing (the second last year on the topic?) in the C-SPAN archives. The earlier one, which comes to a climax with Haynes, is gripping drama. That’s where we learned what “removal of clothing” meant to the insiders (”learned helplessness”), although a lot was lost in the translation by the time interrogators and guards put the theory into practice. Well — EW took Claire McCaskill’s tough questioning of the expression and went one step further to document the behavioural-psych theory behind the “technique.” (I hate using faux-scientific language to describe sheer brutality.)
well folk’s we’ve come FULL CIRCLE here
guess who said THIS:
john bolton
can you fucking believe THAT ???
john bolton just called Spain’s judicial system “inquisitorial”
do they WATERBOARD people and stuff like that, mr bolton ???
the fucking RABBIT HOLE just fell into a fucking rabbit hole
what the fuck do we do now ???
laugh, shit, or go blind ???
why are we still putting up with Plunger ???
is this his blog ???
the stupid fucker is talking to HIMSELF now
can I have him now, PLEASE ???
or just BAN the pathetic shit
please
Man, his first comment was almost on topic. Sometimes gentle coaching works better than confrontation. I know what you are going to say, but i believe in lost causes. When I was a teenager, my sister bought me a T-shirt that said “Help Stop Plate Tectonics”.
Actually, all three of my postings – posted over a 45 minute period – are well referenced and precisely on-topic.
thank you. not that anyone here may care, but i find bullying far more objectionable than a comment i don’t agree with or am uninterested in
Me too
I second Plunger’s motion that Karen Kwiatkowski would be a good source to follow up. From May, 2002, through February, 2003, she was serving in Feith’s DoD shop, and she began her “Deep Throat” posts at Soldiers For The Truth in August, 2002. (IMVHO SFTT has lost a bit of its punch and breadth of focus since founder Col. David Hackworth died, four years ago this week.) Kwiatkowski used to have a regular column at militaryweek.com that was frequently mirrored at lewrockwell.com. Politically she’s a hardcore libertarian, and LRC always tries to promote one of their own. As her military career fades further into the past her writings have more and more often been epistles to the True Believers of her sect, and thus I Haven’t checked her out as frequently. This morning, however, the toobz gives me the “No Can Find” error when I try to surf to MWC. I’ll check a few times today to see if the error is just some sort of transitory toobzal constipation rather than a case of MWC lying ten toes up on a burning boat floating out to sea in the ethereal Valhalla. Since she was an eye and ear witness to much of what went on in Feith’s shop it would be worthwhile to chat her up if she feels she can talk about it.
(my emphasis)
Amazing. Disturbing.
Who suggested the measures? Who gave the initial go ahead for creating the legal rationale for the measures?
EW, just a quick question to clarify… Did Feith say this or was this the quote from the interrogator (who’s name escapes me at the moment) who testified to the Armed Services Committee?
phred
That’s one of the interrogators at Gitmo.
Thanks, that’s what I thought, just wanted to double check.
Aha. I sit corrected.
OT – Red Cross confirms civilians killed in Obama’s Afghan bombing initiative.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200…..fghanistan
Sometimes a person who dwells deeply with a topic stumbles upon key information that has been overlooked.
EW, you are one such person!
Here’s what I think: EW deserves a MacArthur grant! That would set her free to do this research, which is so essential to lay the groundwork for restoring completely the Rule of Law, through exposing the whole truth about the folks who nearly destroyed our Republic.
I’m serious. Wish I had pull.
Watching this thread unfold has been like being at a crime scene as key clues are discovered.
“Dumbest fucking man on the planet.”
Works for me.
And Karen Kwiatkowski is a hossette! Tells it like it is. The good Colonel was dishing the truth about the fucking of the cluster, way back when.
way back when..you can say that again
The New Pentagon Papers
http://dir.salon.com/story/opi…..ndex3.html
“Starting in the fall of 2002 I found a way to vent my frustrations with the neoconservative hijacking of our defense policy. The safe outlet was provided by retired Col. David Hackworth, who agreed to publish my short stories anonymously on his Web site Soldiers for the Truth, under the moniker of “Deep Throat: Insider Notes From the Pentagon.” The “deep throat” part was his idea, but I was happy to have a sense that there were folks out there, mostly military, who would be interested in the secretary of defense-sponsored insanity I was witnessing on almost a daily basis. When I was particularly upset, like when I heard Zinni called a “traitor,” I wrote about it in articles like this one.
In November, my Insider articles discussed the artificial worlds created by the Pentagon and the stupid naiveté of neocon assumptions about what would happen when we invaded Iraq. I discussed the price of public service, distinguishing between public servants who told the truth and then saw their careers flame out and those “public servants” who did not tell the truth and saw their careers ignite. My December articles became more depressing, discussing the history of the 100 Years’ War and “combat lobotomies.” There was a painful one titled “Minority Reports” about the necessity but unlikelihood of a Philip Dick sci-fi style “minority report” on Feith-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney’s insanely grandiose vision of some future Middle East, with peace, love and democracy brought on through preemptive war and military occupation.”
—————————————————————
Did she really say this?
Contributor to 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out 8/23/06: Account of Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Pentagon employee and eyewitness to the events at the Pentagon on 9/11. “I believe the Commission failed to deeply examine the topic at hand, failed to apply scientific rigor to its assessment of events leading up to and including 9/11, failed to produce a believable and unbiased summary of what happened, failed to fully examine why it happened, and even failed to include a set of unanswered questions for future research. …
It is as a scientist that I have the most trouble with the official government conspiracy theory, mainly because it does not satisfy the rules of probability or physics. The collapses of the World Trade Center buildings clearly violate the laws of probability and physics. …
There was a dearth of visible debris on the relatively unmarked [Pentagon] lawn, where I stood only minutes after the impact. Beyond this strange absence of airliner debris, there was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner. This visible evidence or lack thereof may also have been apparent to the secretary of defense [Donald Rumsfeld], who in an unfortunate slip of the tongue referred to the aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon as a “missile”. …
http://aotearoaawiderperspecti…..force-ret/
As the men were in charge of creating this mess, I nominate three women to bring the truth to light:
Marcy Wheeler
Karen Kwiatkowski and
Sibel Edmonds:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7117
Between them, they could reveal the entire conspiracy (blackmail and all) to the world.
And, of course, the more polite and restrained would be the interrogators.
Feith’s little shoppe of tortures – intel, policy and interrogation “techniques” – were a clumsy minor mirroring of Cheney’s doing the same thing in usurping his nominal president’s power. He was right about as often, and just as effective in keeping us safe from harm. His work ought to figure prominently in any Spanish or UK inquisition about torture. But they would be right to do so only if Obama refuses to enforce the law himself.
radiofreewill #24 [Sorry, ‘reply’ didn’t work.]: To have Civilian interference way down the normal Chain of Command like this would be highly abnormal – unless Dunlavey had a Classified, parallel Chain of Command (JTF-170?) that reported directly to Rumsfeld, and then on to Bush.
There was definitely almost exactly such a dual command. From Scott Horton’s interview with Karen Greenberg:
PCTEG were not only ignorant of elicting information and interrogation (that’s why they went to JPRA, who was only so happy to oblige), but they knew little about the analysis of intelligence. But the latter didn’t stop them from stovepiping raw intel and delivering it to Rumsfeld/Cheney.
Now, Mark at 58 makes the key point: how did DoD influence spread to CIA, who held the AZ, KSM, etc., and who signed on Mitchell-Jessen from JPRA?
Plunger says occam’s razor suggests conspiracy to get false confessions. But torture is not to get false confessions (and I’ll write on this soon), but to break down individuals so you can get whatever you want: confessions, intel, sadistic revenge, “psychic driving” to wipe out their memories, etc. So, one can’t say for sure they wanted false confessions, though it certainly looks that way.
It seems it was a gold rush of sorts for these high-value detainees between the different agencies, with a mess of special ops, CIA, FBI, DoD etc., and all suspicious of the others’ intentions. And some of these actors, the contractors, had other motivations (money), while all were seeking bureaucratic kudos for their division. Did the CIA really need Mitchell to show them how to do interrogations? Certainly, JPRA is the link between CIA and DoD. APA may also, at a more distant point, be another link.
I see it this way: there were multiple agendas. The WH need to gin up the “facts” for invasion of Iraq, various agencies vying for control of the “high-value” prisoners (and for influence, which translates into money, power, prestige, and positions/promotions), the drive for both real intel and “false confessions”, also the chance for CIA/CTC to get “real world” experience for some of their theories of social control, interrogations, learn about human response to severe stress (a favorite research subject of theirs, which is why they had their behavioral “consultants” studying SERE schools for years before 9/11). One should not rule out also various counter-intelligence games going on here at well (disinformation, etc.). And all of this had to be going on within the realm of the secret, with its insistence on covering up, need to know, and misdirection, to hide it all from the “outsiders”.
It all came together in what we think of as the torture program, which was really two or more such programs (CIA’s original, derived from Kubark; SERE’s, derived from their program and mingled with distortions via the reverse-engineering, fiddling from the top, and possibly experiments mixed in for the sake of the research docs and scientists back home; and then the adjustments to those programs to satisfy internal opposition and legal constraints as they arose — in the end, the retreat was to the core Kubark program of isolation, induction of debility (sleep deprivation, manipulation of environment), use of fear and control to break down the psyche and instill dependency and influence over the prisoner, which is what remains in Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, the document praised by Obama and Petreus, though Fredman knows better).
So, (much speculation now) CIA, aware that DoD is getting stovepiped info to get around them, are pissed off, gets wind that SECDEF is going to JPRA (perhaps through their special ops contacts, who knows). They coopt JPRA, run Mitchell-Jessen themselves (getting data on stress in the meantime), and then try to turn it more into their kind of program (remembering Mayer’s 2007 article on the Black Sites, which documents how the CIA protested the SERE plan, used it, then set up their own “mechanistic” program based on the old sensory deprivation model). You could say that Mitchell-Jessen were used as a cover to reestablish MKULTRA and earlier like interrogation-torture programs.
And let me join the chorus, EW, on all your great work.
Jeff,
Are you stating essentially that competition to win favor was the driver and that’s how to different agencies ended up with similar approaches? I know I’m over simplifying it but that’s how your insights read.
Okay, your latest comment gives some more clarity. I guess I thought the parallel shop by Rumsfeld was for expediting everything to Bush.
I can’t say why the parallel shop by Rumsfeld was set up. Competition, distrust, lust for power, supposed long-time distrust of CIA. The competition between power groupings is often dictated by the distrust between cliques, rather than anything we would think of as principled differences, with the latter often personalized, or masking underlying social strata conflicts.
What does seem clear is that there was no one underlying conspiracy, but a welter of competing agendas, some of them conspiratorial in that they had to be kept secret, interacting with a number of actors, e.g. professionals just trying to do their job, greedy opportunists, bureaucrats, etc.
The preexistence of a torture program at CIA, and the unknown articulation of DoD departments, particularly Special Operations, with that, is where this all begins. Something was already there, with its own history and development, so that when the current situation appears on the scene, it’s not ab ovo. Mitchell and Jessen did not bring this evil into the world, they merely saw the chance to jump on the gravy train, be big kahunas, heros, like the Special Ops guys they worked with so long.
My timeline is wrong, btw, in that CIA couldn’t have known of stovepiped intel re Iraq in late 2001, so CIA couldn’t have been suspicious. Nevertheless, the tendency to want to go around CIA was evident in Rumsfeld’s attempt to set up his own DoD intel apparatus using JPRA/SERE. Hence, the gold rush that followed… (Also, CIA already had torture in use pre 9/11, via rendition, special ops interrogations, etc.
Second thought (and sorry to abuse the comment system), it was differences over going to war with Iraq that led to the parallel system, with Cheney backing the Feith-Richard Perle configuration born out of the ashes of the old Team B from the 70s.