Top War Profiteer Dough Feith Retires Wealthy
by Evelyn Pringle
Douglas Feith, the recently resigned undersecretary of defense, who just happened to be one of the main people who for years on end advocated for a war in Iraq, and who in large part developed the disastrous policies for the war in Iraq, planned ahead for his retirement and will not be seen in the unemployment line.
On January 27, 2005, the Washington Post announced: "A principal architect of the Defense Department's postwar strategy in Iraq ... will leave his post this summer."
The announcement came after years of rumors that top administration officials had decided that Feith had to go, but were dissuaded by Donald Rumsfeld who argued that his ouster would be viewed as an admission that the war in Iraq was a mistake. But the administration had definitely reduced Feith's authority over the past 2 years.
In announcing his departure, Feith claimed he was leaving for personal reasons, citing the desire to spend more time with his children. "For the last four years, they haven't seen me a lot," he told the Post.
He used the standard administration exit line. Sort of like the noticeably absent in light of Katrina, ex-FEMA director, Joe Albaugh, who left his job to spend time with his family. Joe was Bush’s chief of staff when he was governor of Texas and his campaign manager in 2000. Once Bush took office, Joe accepted a gig as director of FEMA.
Like Feith, when he announced his resignation, Joe said, "Now I am going to take the opportunity to spend some time with my wife and children."
I sure hope Doug spends more time with his kids than Joe did, because judging from hindsight, Joe should have been a psychic. He somehow knew at the beginning of March 2003, that he should quit FEMA and go into the business of securing reconstruction contracts in Iraq for wealthy clients before the first bomb was dropped. And his family could not have enjoyed much quality time at all with Joe, being he opened up New Bridge Strategies for business within a few short weeks of leaving the White House.
At the time, Josh Marshall, who writes a column for the Washington newspaper, The Hill, said that he believed that each new piece of legislation needs a catchy title, and came up with title “The Bush Crony Full-Employment Act of 2003,” for the $87 billion allocated for rebuilding Iraq.
According to Josh, New Bridge was actually an outgrowth of Haley Barbour’s lobbying firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers. Josh says he reached that conclusion after he learned that both firms were located in the same office space. And also because Lanny Griffith was the CEO of New Bridge and Ed Rogers was the vice president. Sounds like a logical conclusion to me.
When the company began, the New Bridges official web site said, "the opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in Washington, D.C., and on the ground in Iraq." That phrasing was quickly changed.
How could it get any sweeter than this? Joe quits FEMA, moves into the office space of one of the most successful and powerful GOP lobbying firms in the country and starts advertising for clients who want to win reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
First Brother, Neil Bush, also jumped on this money train and landed a $60,000 a year consultant contract with a principal in New Bridge. According to Neil's testimony in his divorce deposition in March 2004, in return for his salary, he took phone messages for about 3 hours a week.
However, 3 people contacted by the Financial Times of London reported seeing letters written by Neil that recommend business ventures promoted by New Bridges in the Middle East. So we had Neil being paid an annual fee to "help companies secure contracts in Iraq," the Times reported.
I'm not too worried about Doug Feith ending up in the unemployment lines because following in Joe's footsteps, Feith and his law partner stayed very busy behind the scenes planning for Feith's retirement when it came time to leave the White House.
The Iraqi International Law Group
Before Feith was inducted into the Bush administration, he was the Feith half of the Feith & Zell law firm in Washington. His partner, Marc Zell, simply renamed the firm Zell, Goldberg & Co when they decided to set up shop to start cashing in on the Iraq contracting business.
According to The Hill, Zell was helping with international marketing for a concern called the Iraqi International Law Group. Billing itself as a group of lawyers and businessmen interested in helping investors in Iraq, the venture was run by Ahmed Chalabi's nephew Salem, who doubled as a legal adviser to Iraq's governing council, of which his uncle was a member.
How powerful was Feith in awarding contracts? Extremely. According to a June, 2004, an article in Time Magazine entitled, "The Paper Trail: Did Cheney Okay a Deal?," Feith is the person who approved the controversial no-bid contract for Halliburton in Iraq. Time Magazine quoted an email sent by Stephen Browning of the Army Corps of Engineers, that said the contract for construction of oil pipelines was approved by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith "contingent on informing WH tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP's [Vice President's] office.
Browning, later said in an interview that he wrote the memo after he and retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner met with Feith. According to Browning, Feith told him that he had already informed Cheney's office. The email was dated March 5, 2003, and Halliburton was awarded the contract three days later with no bids tendered by any other companies.
If he could pull this off for Halliburton, what he could do for the IILG goes without saying. According to its web site, the IILG was made up of lawyers and businessmen who claimed to have “dared to take the lead in bringing private sector investment and experience” to the war-torn country and offered to “be your Professional Gateway to the New Iraq.”
The way it was set up, nephew Salem was charge of the IILG and Feith's partner, Zell, was in charge of international marketing. The IILG's website claimed that it was the only firm worth consulting. "At IILG, our task is to provide foreign enterprise with the information and tools it needs to enter the emerging Iraq and to succeed," it said.
"Our clients number among the largest corporations and institutions on the planet" it said, "They have chosen IILG to provide them with real-time, on the ground intelligence they cannot get from inexperienced local firms or from overburdened coalition and local government officials."
Imagine that, the top firms on the planet. "Many firms outside the country purport to counsel companies about doing business in Iraq," the web site read. "The simple fact is: you cannot adequately advise about Iraq unless you are here day in and day out, working closely with officials at the CPA, the newly constituted governing council and the few functioning civilian ministries [oil, labor and social welfare, etc]."
The truth is, the IILG was nothing more than another one of many front companies, in a web-like profiteering network, that was specifically set up to funnel tax dollars through Iraq and back into the pockets of the Bush gang.
And talk about blatant. When the company was set up, its website was not registered to Salem Chalabi; it was registered under the name of Marc Zell, located at the very same address as Zell, Goldberg & Co.
According to Salem, quoted in the National Journal, Zell was IILG's "marketing consultant" and had been contacting law firms in Washington and New York to ask if they had clients interested in doing business in Iraq.
This tied in with an announcement by Zell, Goldberg & Co, that it had set up a "task force" dealing with issues and opportunities relating to the "recently ended" war in Iraq, and to assist companies "in their relations with the United States government in connection with Iraqi reconstruction projects as prime contractors and consultants."
Of course Zell made no mention of the firm's ties to the infamous nephew Salem or the IILG. Zell said it was working with the Federal Market Group, an organization which specialized in helping companies win government contracts, which boasted of having a 90% success rate.
Considering all of its boasting about high level connections, IILG was also rather modest about the family ties of its founder. The website did not mention that he was the nephew of Ahmed Chalabi even once. Geez, I wonder why.
Implementing The Iraq Profiteering Scheme
Feith had been pushing for the ouster of Saddam for years. In 1998, he and Richard Perle sent a letter to President Bill Clinton proposing that the US team up with Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress to get rid of Saddam. Clinton refused.
As we all know, Ahmed had strong support within the Pentagon. In fact, two of his staunchest supporters were Feith and Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board.
Perle, an assistant defense secretary during the Reagan administration, was appointed by his old crony, Donald Rumsfeld, to lead the board in 2001. Its a well-known fact that the board exerts tremendous influence when it comes to war policies.
As soon as Bush took office, Perle, Feith and Ahmed Chalabi all started working diligently together to get the war in Iraq off the ground, with Ahmed providing bogus intelligence about WMDs and bragging about a secret network within Iraq which could take over running the country after the invasion.
"There was a close personal bond, too, between Chalabi, Wolfowitz and Perle dating back many years," according to Seymour Hersh in the May 5, 2003 the New Yorker.
"Their relationship deepened after the Bush Administration took office, and Chalabi’s ties extended to others in the Administration, including Rumsfeld; Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; and I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff," Hersh wrote.
"With the Pentagon’s support, Chalabi’s group worked to put defectors with compelling stories in touch with reporters in the United States and Europe," Hersh said, "The resulting articles had dramatic accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction or told of ties to terrorist groups. In some cases, these stories were disputed in analyses by the C.I.A." he noted.
Almost immediately after September 11th, "the I.N.C. began to publicize the stories of defectors who claimed that they had information connecting Iraq to the attacks, Hersh said.
For example, in a October 14, 2001, interview on PBS “Frontline," Sabah Khodada, an Iraqi Army captain, said that the 9/11 attack “was conducted by people who were trained by Saddam,” and that Iraq had a program to instruct terrorists in the art of hijacking. Another defector, who was identified as a retired lieutenant general in the Iraqi intelligence service, said that in 2000 he witnessed Arab students being given lessons in hijacking on a Boeing 707 parked at an Iraqi training camp near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.
Feith then fed this type of INC data into a fabrication mill operating at top speed known as the Office of Special Plans and some of the information processed through the OSP was not even shared with official intelligence agencies. In many instances it was passed on to the National Security Council, Cheney, and Bush without having been vetted by anyone besides this group of nitwits.
And they had to know that much of the information was false. A former high-level intelligence official told Hersh that American Special Forces units had been sent into Iraq in mid-March 2003, before the start of the war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. “They came up with nothing,” the official told Hersh. “Never found a single Scud.”
A 46 page report, based on a 15-month investigation, titled "Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis of the Issue of an Iraq-al Qaeda Relationship" was released on October 21, 2004, which said, "There is ample evidence that the Bush Administration had a predisposition to overthrow Saddam Hussein before the 9/11 attacks."
The report accused Feith's office of compiling "selective reinterpretations of intelligence" that went beyond the views of American spy agencies in order to help make the case for an invasion of Iraq.
The report concluded that Feith and his staff were convinced that a relationship existed between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and that the office had advanced that perspective by trying to change the intelligence community's views and "by taking its interpretation straight to policymakers."
"That alleged relationship," the report said, "coupled with the assertion that Iraq possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), was the major argument presented by the Administration for invading Iraq."
Relying on selective reporting, irrespective of credibility and reliability, Feith’s briefing concluded the following:
dual-national traitor, should be investigated for treason
Portrait of a neo-con
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As the United States and the world look back over the events of the past three years, events triggered by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it is worth taking a close look at the under secretary of defense for policy, one of the architects of the "war on terror" and the invasion of Iraq.
Douglas Feith is the No 3 civilian in the George W Bush administration's Department of Defense (DoD), under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Under Secretary for Policy Feith had previously served in the administration of the late president Ronald Reagan, starting off as Middle East specialist at the National Security Council (1981-82) and then transferring to the DoD, where he spent two years as staff lawyer for assistant defense secretary Richard Perle. In 1984 Feith advanced to become deputy assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy. Feith and Perle were among the leading advocates of a policy to build closer US military and diplomatic ties with Turkey and to increase military ties between Turkey and Israel.
Feith left the DoD in mid-1986 to found the Feith & Zell law firm, based initially in Israel, whose clients included major military contractor Northrup Grumman. In 1989, Feith established another company, International Advisors Inc, which provided lobbying services to foreign clients, including Turkey.
Feith's private business dealings raised eyebrows in Washington. In 1999, his firm Feith & Zell formed an alliance with the Israel-based Zell, Goldberg & Co, which resulted in the creation of the Fandz International Law Group. According to Fandz' website, the law group "has recently established a task force dealing with issues and opportunities relating to the recently ended war with Iraq and is assisting regional construction and logistics firms to collaborate with contractors from the United States and other coalition countries in implementing infrastructure and other reconstruction projects in Iraq." Remarked Washington Post columnist Al Kamen, "Interested parties can reach [Fandz] through its website, at www.fandz.com. Fandz.com? Hmmm. Rings a bell. Oh, yes, that was the website of the Washington law firm of Feith & Zell, PC, as in Douglas Feith [the] under secretary of defense for policy and head of - what else? - reconstruction matters in Iraq. It would be impossible indeed to overestimate how perfect ZGC would be in 'assisting American companies in their relations with the United States government in connection with Iraqi reconstruction projects'."
A vocal advocate of US intervention in the Middle East and for the hardline policies of the Likud Party in Israel, Feith has been involved in or overseen the activities of two controversial Pentagon operations - the Defense Policy Board, whose former head Richard Perle resigned after concerns arose about conflicts of interest between his board duties and business dealings, and the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which allegedly misrepresented intelligence on Iraq to support administration policies. Feith's office not only housed the Office of Special Plans and other special intelligence operations associated with the Near East and South Asia (NESA) office and the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs but also the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, who directed military policy on interrogations of the Guantanamo Bay detainees and then arranged for the transfer of the base's commanding officer, Major-General Geoffrey Miller, to the Abu Ghraib prison in an effort to extract more information from Iraqi prisoners.
Feith and Israel
Feith cannot be described by just one label. He is a longtime militarist, a neo-conservative, and a right-wing Zionist. According to Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, Feith was described by the military commander who led the Iraq invasion, General Tommie Franks, as "the f---ing stupidest guy on the face of the Earth", referring to the bad intelligence fed to the military about Iraq and the extent of possible resistance to a US invasion.
Feith also has a reputation as a prolific writer, having published articles on international law and on foreign and defense policy in the New York Times, the Washington Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and The New Republic.
His militarism - and close ties with the military-industrial complex - were evident in his policy work in the Pentagon working with Perle in the 1980s and then part of the Vulcans along with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Vice President Richard Cheney in the Bush II administration; his work as a corporate lobbyist in the 1990s for Northrup Grumman along other military contractors; and his prominent role in the Center for Security Policy and in the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). His political orientation is distinctly neo-conservative, as evident in his affiliations with such groups as the Middle East Forum, Center for Security Policy, and Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS).
Feith served as chairman of the board of directors of the Center for Security Policy, a policy institute that promotes higher military budgets, missile defense systems, space weapons programs, and hardline policies in the Middle East and East Asia. CSP was founded in 1988 by Frank Gaffney, a fellow neo-con and, like Feith, a former DoD official in the Reagan administration. Feith helped Gaffney organize CSP's large advisory board, which includes leading neo-cons, arms lobbyists, and the leading congressional members linked to the military-industrial complex. Feith has also served as an adviser to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which aims to foster closer working relationships between the Israeli military, the US military, the Pentagon, and military contractors in both countries.
Feith has supported lobbying efforts aimed at persuading the US to drop out of treaties and arms control agreements. Wrote one journalist in The Nation, "Largely ignored or derided at the time, a 1995 [Center for Security Policy -CSP] memo co-written by Douglas Feith holding that the United States should withdraw from the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty has essentially become policy, as have other CSP reports opposing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the International Criminal Court."
Feith is a self-proclaimed Zionist - not a Labor Zionist but a right-wing Zionist close to the Likud Party and the Zionist Organization of America.
In the 1990s, Feith was an outspoken critic of the Middle East policies of both the Bush and Bill Clinton administrations that he said were based on the faulty "peace now" and "land for peace" policy frameworks. Instead, he called for a "peace through strength" agenda for Israel and the US - invoking a phrase promoted by the neo-conservatives since the mid-1970s, which became the slogan of the Center for Security Policy.
The Middle East Information Center described Feith as an "ideologue with an extreme anti-Arab bias", remarking that "during the Clinton years, Feith continued to oppose any agreement negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinians: Oslo, Hebron and Wye". Feith "defined Oslo as 'one-sided Israeli concessions, inflated Palestinian expectations, broken Palestinian solemn understandings, Palestinian violence ... and American rewards for Palestinian recalcitrance'."
In 1991, Feith, together with Gaffney, addressed the National Leadership Conference of the State of Israel Organization. In Feith's view, it was foolish for the US government and Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians over issues of land given that contrasting principles - not differences over occupied lands - fueled the Israeli-Arab conflict. He noted that, even before Israel was established, Western political leaders mistakenly thought that "the vast territories newly made available for the fulfillment of Arab ambitions for independence would make it easier to win acceptance within the region of a Jewish state in Palestine". According to Feith, no matter what they say publicly or at the negotiating table, the Palestinians have always rejected the principle of legitimacy, namely "the legitimacy of Zionist claims to a Jewish National Homeland in the Land of Israel". Criticizing the George H W Bush administration's attempt to broker a land for peace deal, Feith warned, "If Western statesmen openly recognized the problem as a clash of principles, they would not be able to market hope through the launching of peace initiatives."
In 1997 the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) honored Dalck Feith and Douglas Feith at its annual dinner. It described the Feiths as "noted Jewish philanthropists and pro-Israel activists". The father was awarded the group's special Centennial Award "for his lifetime of service to Israel and the Jewish people", while Douglas received the "prestigious Louis D Brandeis Award".
Dalck Feith was a militant in Betar, a Zionist youth movement founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Italian fascist Benito Mussolini. Betar, whose members wore dark-brown uniforms and spouted militaristic slogans modeled after other fascistic movements, was associated with the Revisionist Movement, which evolved in Poland to become the Herut Party, which later became the Likud Party.
In 1999 Douglas Feith wrote an essay for a book titled The Dangers of a Palestinian State, which was published by ZOA. Also in 1999, Feith spoke to a 150-member ZOA lobbying mission to Congress that called, among other things, for "US action against Palestinian Arab killers of Americans" and for moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The ZOA lobbying group also criticized the Clinton administration for its "refusal to criticize illegal Palestinian Arab construction in Jerusalem and the territories, which is far more extensive than Israeli construction there".
Initially, Feith strongly supported the Benjamin Netanyahu government controlled by the Likud Party. Immediately before Netanyahu took office, Feith in a Washington Times op-ed wrote: "His Likud Party is in general about as radical as our Republican Party. Mr Netanyahu favors diplomatic, defense, and economic policies for Israel similar in principal to the kind of policies that Reaganites favored (and favor) for the United States." In the opinion piece, Feith echoed the Likud position on peace negotiations and occupied territories. According to Feith, "Israel is unlikely over time to retain control over pieces of territory unless its people actually live there. Supporters of settlements reason: If Israelis do not settle an area in the territories, Israel will eventually be forced to relinquish it. If it relinquishes the territories generally, its security will be undermined and peace therefore will not be possible."
Feith wrote that the Likud Party's policies were guided by the "peace-through-strength principle". Feith took the opportunity of the op-ed to explain that both Israel and the US would benefit from a strong commitment to missile defense. According to Feith, Israel would directly benefit from the installation of a sea-based, wide-area missile defense system, which would supplement Israel's own national missile defense system that the US helped develop. Noting the symbiosis of US and Israeli interests, Feith wrote that Netanyahu knew that "if he encourages Israel's friends in Congress to support such programs, he will create much goodwill with the broad-based forces in the United States, led by the top Republicans in Congress, that deem missile defense the gravest US military deficiency". Feith didn't see fit to mention that, along with Israel, the main beneficiary of such a global missile defense system would be military contractors such as the ones he represented in his law firm, including Northrup Grumman.
Feith is also well known for his participation - along with neo-conservative bigwigs Richard Perle and David Wurmser - in a 1996 study organized by the Israel-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, which urged scrapping the then-ongoing peace process. The study, titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm", advised prime minister-elect Netanyahu "to work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll back" regional threats, help overthrow Saddam Hussein, and strike "Syrian military targets in Lebanon" and possibly in Syria proper.
Three of the six authors of the report - Perle (who was IASPS team leader), Wurmser and Feith - helped set the Middle East strategy, including strong support for current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's hardline policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the Bush II administration. Perle chaired the DoD's Defense Policy Board, Feith became under secretary of defense for policy, and Wurmser became Vice President Cheney's top Middle East adviser after leaving the State Department, where he had worked under Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton.
Other members of the IASPS study group on "A New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000" included James Colbert of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), and Jonathan Torop of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a neo-conservative think-tank founded by a director of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). At the time the report was published, Wurmser was an associate of IASPS.
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