Rumsfeld's Pentagon reissued clearances to Feith, Perle and Wolfowitz ... Feith was relieved of his clearances for allegedly passing sectets to AIPAC

The Raw Story | Pentagon investigation of Iraq war hawk stalling Senate inquiry into pre-war Iraq intelligence: "Larisa Alexandrovna | Published: January 30, 2006

The second part of the Senate investigation into bungled pre-war Iraq intelligence is still being held up by an internal Pentagon investigation of Douglas Feith, one of the war's leading architects, RAW STORY has learned.

As previously reported by Raw Story, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) inquiry -- titled Phase II -- is waiting on a report from the Pentagon inspector general as to Feith's alleged role in manipulating pre-war intelligence to support a case for war. Feith, who is also being probed by the FBI for his role in an Israeli spy case, resigned in January 2005.

More broadly, a RAW STORY investigation has found that Feith's access to classified information and his alleged wrongdoing can likely be laid at the feet of more senior officials in the Bush Administration -- namely Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- who would have had to have overruled Pentagon background checks to reissue Feith's clearances after he was booted from the National Security Council for allegations of espionage in the mid 1980s. ...
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At the heart of the Senate Intelligence Committee's delay is the fact that Feith and the Defense Department refuse to provide documents and witnesses to the Committee. Senate sources say that Feith and the Pentagon have made the case that they will not share any information until the Senate provides them with full documentation of what the investigation is looking into, documentary evidence that Senate staff have acquired, and any other key findings that Feith's lawyers believe should be made available to them.
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This lack of oversight has caused great concern among many former military and intelligence sources. One former intelligence source point to "a bigger can of worms" that a Feith investigation may unravel, pointing to the Israeli spy case -- in which Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin passed classified information to a pro-Israeli lobby -- and to the Defense Department's own inability to address security breaches.

In 1978, the current head of the World Bank and former Deputy Defense Secretary Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was investigated for passing classified information through AIPAC, the same organization that Franklin is charged with passing state secrets to.

Wolfowitz, who at the time was working for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), was himself brought in by yet another high level alleged leaker, Richard Perle. Perle, too, is being investigated in the current AIPAC case.

Perle, who most recently served as chairman of the Pentagon Defense Policy Board and quietly resigned after the AIPAC case broke, was alleged to have passed on highly classified information to the Israeli embassy when he was a foreign policy aide for Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson in 1970.

Perle was instrumental in bringing Feith into several positions, starting in the early 80s. By the mid-1980s Feith was relieved of his clearances for allegations of passing secrets to AIPAC, bringing the question of clearances full circle.

Rumsfeld seen to reinstate clearances

Despite their checkered past, Rumsfeld's Pentagon reissued clearances to Feith, Perle and Wolfowitz. Clearances were also issued to several of Feith's consultants, some of whom were major players in the Iran Contra scandal. ...

"Fixed" Intelligence from Feith's "Gestapo Office,"

"Fixed" Intelligence from Feith's "Gestapo Office,": "'By Walter C. Uhler | 01/21/06 'ICH'

The CIA and the Bush Administration's Impeachable Lies about Iraq's Prewar Links to al Qaeda

Except in the cynical, zealous or spiritually clouded minds of his right wing devotees, it's become a well-established (if under reported) fact that President George W. Bush is a serial liar, if not a congenital liar.1 For example, after The New York Times very belatedly leaked Mr. Bush's unconstitutional order permitting the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without obtaining the required court-approved warrants, Bush defended his directive as a 'vital tool' in the war against terrorism.

But, as liars commonly do, Bush seems to have forgotten that in April 2004 he told an audience in Buffalo, New York: 'When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so.' He also told the audience that precisely because it was 'the United States government talking about wiretap,' Americans could rest assured that 'constitutional guarantees are in place.' 2"
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The brief answer is: Because Douglas Feith's PCEG (which would merge into the Office of Special Plans) was still feeding him the bogus intelligence that confirmed what he already "knew." The PCEG did not simply "study the policy implications of relationships among terrorist organizations and their sources of support," as Feith falsely testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), but also "reviewed both raw and finished intelligence and did undertake their own intelligence analysis after looking at the IC [Intelligence Community] products and discovering that what they needed had not been produced by the IC." ¹⁸

What's worse, without exception, Feith's PCEG produced intelligence products that consistently exaggerated the number, type, significance and danger of the ties it found between Iraq and al Qaeda. And although it was wrong on every one of its assessments, not one of its errors resulted in underestimating the threat. This pattern of errors in one direction suggests fraud and the 'fixing" of intelligence, not mere incompetence.

But, thanks to the intervention of Feith's boss, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the politicized intelligence gathered by this rogue "Iraqi intelligence cell in the OUSD(P)" ¹⁹ -- "rogue," because it was operating outside the established intelligence agencies funded by Congress and subject to congressional oversight -- was presented to (and impressed) Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, briefed to Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet (but minus the slide disparaging the CIA), and ultimately presented to Condoleezza Rice's deputy (Stephen Hadley) and Cheney's Chief of Staff, "Scooter" Libby. That last briefing took place without the knowledge of Tenet.
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Feith staffed the PCEG with his co-author of the 1996 report (and fellow unregistered agent for Israel) David Wurmser, as well as Michael Maloof. Wurmser and Maloof would be "working deductively, not inductively: The premise was true; facts would be found to confirm it." ⁶⁴ As the authors of Vanity Faire write in their exceptional expose, The Path to War, "the advocates of regime change in Iraq realized that, for any American invasion to enlist support, both domestically and internationally, links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda needed to be proved." ⁶⁵ Thus, in light of the CIA's September 21, 2001 President's Daily Brief, somebody needed to fix the facts!

At this point, one might ask, as George Packer does in his highly acclaimed book, The Assassin's Gate: "Does this mean that a pro-Likud cabal insinuated its way into the high councils of the U.S. government and took hold of the apparatus of American foreign policy to serve Israeli interests?" In general, Packer's answer is no. But "For Feith and Wurmser," Packer answers yes: "the security of Israel was probably the prime mover." ^66
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Inspired by Mossad, Feith's rogue intelligence cell appears to have solicited, reexamined, digested and regurgitated evidence from the programmed liars put forward by Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress - evidence that the Intelligence Community already had considered, before dismissing as unreliable. Then, as Seymour Hersh has noted: "A routine settled in: the Pentagon's defector reports, classified 'secret,' would be funneled to newspapers, but subsequent analyses of the reports by intelligence agencies - scathing but also classified - would remain secret."¹²⁹

Perhaps, that explains why even Secretary of State Colin Powell privately referred to Feith's intelligence cell as "Feith's Gestapo office." How ironic! Neocon Jews running a "Gestapo office." Finally, and most significantly, let's not forget that this "un-American intelligence" got it wrong!

Can the United States still be called a "democracy," if a majority of its citizens fails to recognize and redress such "un-American" behavior? ("Un-American," at least according to our ideals, if not our actual history.) ...

Riskiest manifestation of the "neoconservative revolution": the push to unilaterally invade and democratize Iraq

The Forward Newspaper Online: The Neoconservative Persuasion: "By Gal Beckerman | January 6, 2006

Acknowledging the Jewishness of neoconservatism has always triggered the red, flashing lights of antisemitism, especially since the start of the Iraq War (with extra points if it's Pat Buchanan doing the acknowledging). But there is some truth to the suspicion. If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants' grandchildren. Understanding what might be Jewish about this movement (or "persuasion" as its godfather, Irving Kristol, prefers it be called) should be possible without being accused of conspiracy theorizing about secret cabals pulling strings for Israel.
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Strangely absent from Friedman's books is any discussion of the latest and certainly riskiest manifestation of the "neoconservative revolution": the push to unilaterally invade and democratize Iraq. It's a strange oversight for a book published two years after the start of the war. Friedman wouldn't have needed even to introduce new characters. Among the war's most passionate supporters, after all, were Norman Podhoretz and William Kristol (son of Irving).

The omission is glaring. Not just because Iraq is the next chapter in the neoconservative story, but because it is in Iraq that neoconservatism will be either vindicated or buried forever. Maybe even more than Reagan's Cold War policies, the Iraq War was the most dramatic embodiment of two key Podhoretz tenets, the "aggressive" side that would keep America on the initiative, and the "idealistic" that dreams of making theworld safer by remaking it in our image. For neoconservatives, the 9/11 attacks signaled

the start of a new global war against an ideology as morally corrupt and potentially as apocalyptically destructive as Nazism and communism. Podhoretz famously dubbed it World War IV, the Cold War having been World World III. (It was 1939 again.) The threat had to be confronted head on. And this time the present danger had no one obvious home, other than where the peripatetic Osama bin Laden parked himself. Accordingly, a dramatic, history-altering gesture was necessary to reshape the entire Middle East. The intransigent Iraqi dictator appeared to be the perfect target and Iraq the perfect first domino that, once tipped, would remodel the region.
Afterward, however, with no weapons of mass destruction and no Iraqi connection to 9/11 in evidence, the more idealistic motives of the neoconservatives took center stage. Describing an "evil" that he named "Islamic Radicalism," "militant Jihadism" or, most expressively, "Islamo-fascism," President Bush spent almost the entirety of an October 2005 speech drawing connections between Nazism, communism and this new totalitarianism. Proclaiming that "our enemy is utterly committed," Bush said that "the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history. Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously — and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply." ...