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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, February 09, 2007

Refreshing The Neocon View Of Morality, Feith Edition 

...the world would be a better place if we didn't have to hear the name Douglas Feith ever again, given his role in leading us into the "Mess in Messopotamia" that we are entangled in, but today's release of the report on the behavior of his Pentagon-based Office of Special Plans and it's (and his) role in leading us into Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure brings us back to consideration of him and all that he means...

We have commented here about Feith and his leading role in our current Iraqi debacle in the past. Allison Hantschel (Athenae of First Draft) published a book including a collection of "pointy end of the arrow" blog posts (which The Grumpy Forester was honored to be a party to, although in retrospect I kind of wish I could redo my "about the bloggers" entry) that nailed down by the gills the whole sordid little game that Feith and his "Special Plans" trolls cranked out, and the most disturbing aspect of the revelation of today's report is that there just isn't any surprise for anybody who either contributed to or read the book (which you should buy, not only for it's deathless prose but for its historic role in demonstrating that a grass-roots medium like blogtopia (y!sctp!) is at least as good at getting to the truth as all that big-time high-dollar corporate-controlled MSM...

More than anything else, today's report brings us back to the "why" of this whole ugly little tragedy. History, insofar as it pays attention to this sordid little disaster, is going to show that there were good reasons why insufficient numbers of troops were committed to the invasion to begin with, why the intial looting and civil disruption wasn't properly dealt with, why rank amateurs and rookies with no better qualifications than being faithful Republicans were put in charge of nation-building, and why it all devolved into the civil war that Bushco refuses to acknowledge. Feith and his "Special Plans" minions aren't directly to blame for all of that, but they and he represent one of the most important building blocks for all that came afterword. In large part you can say that over 3000 American troops wouldn't be dead without this building block, nor would tens and tens of thousands of Iraqis. Over 20 thousand Americans wouldn't be dealing with recovering from life-changing wounds and uncountable thousands more wouldn't be dealing with the emotional toll of their tours. Thousands of National Guard and Reserve soldiers and their families wouldn't be dealing with the brutal fallout of a contract fulfillment that they never dreamed of having to face...

All of this has gone down because Douglas Feith and his little band produced a special sort of "intelligence" that was both outside of normal channels and outside of the mainstream of thought in intelligence circles. The Office of Special Plans now stands officially accused of little less than manufacturing a "mature" al Qaida connection with Saddam's government where one didn't appear to exist, either in reality or in the assessment of more mature, experienced branches of the US intelligence community. Mr. Feiths take on this revelation?

Asked to comment on the IG's findings, Feith said in a telephone interview that he had not seen the report but was pleased to hear that it concluded his office's activities were neither illegal nor unauthorized.


Apparently that is the new bottom line in the Neocon's world view as far as appropriate behavior is concerned. What Rumsfeld's little ad hoc creation in the Pentagon did, ramrodded by wagonmaster Douglas Feith, wasn't - technically - illegal, nor was it - technically or officially - unauthorized. Was it professional? No. Was it otherwise sufficiently vetted to earn it inclusion into the larger body of intelligence? No. Was it Illegal? Well, no, because there isn't much in the way of law to stand in way of an Administration cooking the books to make a point in matters of War and Not-War. Was it unauthorized? Oh, hell, no. The Office of Special Plans was intended to perform the exact function that it did: produce intelligency-looking products to justify invasion, and they did their job well. Feith should be relieved; the likelihood of facing some sort of penalty for this job well done is so small that even the most courageous and experienced Las Vegas bookies wouldn't dream of offering odds...

It must be an odd world in which to live: comfortable in the knowledge that you aren't facing prosecution for having created an alternate universe where down is up and wrong is right and war was undertaken for reasons that couldn't be replicated but can't be disproven. It is the benchmark of the new morality, as practiced by Neocon's and right-wingers: it wasn't illegal, so it must be O.K....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:05 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

A Strange, Strange World 

...so I'm sitting at home, trying to get it all together after taking my contribution to the future to school after having returned from a night at a sleep disorder facility where the severity of my sleep apnea was being diagnosed, and I'm watching cable TV news. Through my exhaustion - sleep disorder clinics not being the sort of place where you should ever hope to get any, much less a good night's, sleep - I discover that there are some really important things going on in the world. The dirty little surprise is that this information came to me only because of the "crawl" information at the bottom of the screen, because as far as the mavens of cable TV news were concerned, the biggest news of the day was all about a female NASA astronaut going over the high side in a classic high school girls' locker room cat fight for one of the cool guys in class. It even ranked highly enough in the news world that NASA was forced to hold a press conference to discuss the issue...

There is no word on whether the federal Natural Resource Conservation Service will be forced to face the same penetrating questions about how employees are selected if one of it's female soil scientists goes after Lulu the waitress down at the Five Spot Cafe over the affections of the hottest bachelor farmer in Iowa, but for plain spectacle it really says all that needs sayin' about the affections and focus of the media. This is what we devolve to when there are an insufficient supply of missing blonde college girls and the news cycle somehow needs to have it's bloodshot jaundiced eye turned away from the things that really, actually matter to our acual lives. Gee Dub has a new budget out that cuts the guts out of Medicare and Medicaid while throwing more money at the Pentagon - not so much to support our last gasps in Iraq as it is to prop up programs that look to be headed nowhere fast. Almost every word uttered in the Scooter Libby trial seems to suggest that Big Dick Cheney may not make it all the way through his term of office, for reasons that Spiro Agnew, if nobody else, would understand completely. Oh, and by the way, Americans continue to die in Iraq, with the added story - which should draw the attention of anyone who understands how and why the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan - about helicopters suddenly starting to fall out of the skies like autumn leaves, victims intially of mechanical problems or pilot error until it is later revealed that maybe - juuust maybe - all of those causes might just happen to involve shoulder launched SA-7 "Grail" missles or rocket-propelled grenades or intense weapon fire directed toward those helicopters...

With all of this - and oh so much more going on in Congress - we see the media devoting hours of attention to one whacked out woman who just happens to have a connection to the space program and her strange behavior. We see NASA officials having to subject themselves to a strange assortment of questions that have nothing whatsoever to do with their mission, having in some strange sense to take responsibility for the current mental state of an employee in a situation where that employee's behavior is outside of the company's control. Yes, it is scandalous and, yes, it should attract an employer's attention, but it is not the big issue of the day. It's all a ripping good yarn and could well be a best seller in that strange world of ripped-bodice paperbacks, but damned few lives will be affected in any way by the outcome of this story - even at the space agency - and that most certainly can't be said of all the stories most Americans aren't hearing because of all this extraneous soap opera noise...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:23 PM 0 comments

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