Douglas Feith Resigning!

[Stephanie]

Just heard on NPR. Wants to spend more time with his family. Has nothing to do with his disastrous planning for Iraq, nor the Pentagon spy scandal. Ahem.

____________________________

Feith to leave Defense Department job
Spokesman: War planner not resigning for policy reasons
Updated: 7:39 p.m. ET Jan. 26, 2005

WASHINGTON - Douglas Feith, the Defense Department’s top policy officer and an architect of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, announced Wednesday that he would leave his job this summer for personal and family reasons.

****

Before the Iraq war, Feith oversaw Defense Department officials accused of selectively using uncorroborated intelligence reports to build what turned out to be the false case that President Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of banned deadly weapons.

He has also been blamed for overseeing what is widely considered by U.S. officials to have been inadequate postwar planning.

Feith’s planned departure had nothing to do with policy matters, said Eric Ruff, a spokesman for the Defense Department.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6873108/

____________________________

[sendero]

1. In the immortal words....

... of Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull)

"The wise man breaks wind and is gone" :)

[DoYouEverWonder]

2. Wants to spend more time with his family

Yeah, right.

I's sure it doesn't have anything to do with that little spy ring in the Pentagon?

Or the screw ups in Intel leading to the Iraq War?

Maybe W will try to talk him into staying and give him his own department? That's what Condi got when she claimed to be leaving at the end of W's first term.

[Vinca]

3. One down.

[DoYouEverWonder]

4. Unfortunately, not yet

he says he plans to stay until the summer. He probably wants to wait till they do the first bombing runs into Iran. Probably wants to have one more wargasm before he goes.

[semillama]

21. That image should be on billboards across the entire nation. n/t

[Stephanie]

5. I think it's the spy ring

Why else? They seem to think his policies are just great. In fact, they're ready to implement the rest of them. Iran's next.

[CWebster]

6. He wanted to "spend time with his family"

Apparently, they couldn't get him out the door fast enough. Not that they had to worry about him ever being held accountable for anything. Who would be demanding it, after all? The press? Hillary?

[proudbluestater]

7. Will he, too, get a medal on his way out the door?

[NewYorkerfromMass]

8. He was not much loved at the Pentagon

"...Some of the vitriol directed at Feith by anonymous sources may be due to personal animus. A 2002 Washington Post profile of Feith noted that he is "disliked by many people who work with him on a daily basis," and in March 2003 the National Journal noted that "it is hard to overstate how utterly Feith is reviled in certain circles." The latest manifestation of this is the juicy quote by Gen. Tommy Franks in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, in which Franks calls Feith "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth."

http://slate.msn.com/id/2100899/

[AntiCoup2K4]

9. Spending time with his family, huh?

Hopefully that means he's going home to see his father ------> :evilgrin:

[Roland99]

10. Bet he was starting to feel some heat...the curtain was being pulled aside

Check out these articles, too:


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6100308/site/newsweek

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48639-2004Sep24.html

[Stephanie]

13. I think your WaPo link is wrong - I found this one:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39517-2005Jan26.html?sub=AR


LOL! Dana Priest edits the Franks quote - note that Feith has no plans whatsoever. Very mysterious.

Retired Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, once commander of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, called him "the stupidest guy on the face of the Earth" in his recent book. Feith and Franks tangled often, including over a proposal to train 5,000 Iraqi soldiers to be interpreters and guides during the war.

Feith said yesterday that "controversy about important national security issues is to be expected. That's part of the job." He counted as his greatest achievement his work in devising the Pentagon's overall counterterrorism strategy, including that used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I don't have any definite plans," he said of his post-Pentagon life. "I just have some notions."

[Roland99]

14. No...it shows a possible link between Feith and the coup attempt

[Stephanie]

17. I don't see any reference to Feith in that story -

Did they edit it out?

[Roland99]

19. They are articles I lifted the thread in the LBN forum

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6100308/site/newsweek

Oct. 4 issue - The International Peace Operations Association has a lot more clout at the Pentagon than the name might suggest. Calling itself an "association of military-service provider companies," it's the closest thing in Washington to a lobbying group for soldiers of fortune. At the outfit's annual dinner last November, the guest speaker was Theresa Whelan, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for African affairs, from the policy directorate headed by Douglas Feith, the controversial under secretary of Defense. Whelan's topic: the U.S. government's increasing use of private military contractors, especially in Africa.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48639-2004Sep24.html

Now Tchimuishi is one of 65 men -- about 20 of whom are former members of Os Terriveis -- jailed in Zimbabwe for their roles in an alleged plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich country in Central Africa slightly smaller than Maryland. The men were arrested in March on an airstrip in Zimbabwe. Officials there say they were trying to pick up weapons on their way to topple the president of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, to allow for an exiled opposition leader to take his place. About 14 people are on trial in Equatorial Guinea on related charges.

The case has caught the public's attention in both South Africa and Britain because of the involvement of some upper-crust Britons, including the alleged coup leader, Simon Mann, the heir to a brewery fortune, and his longtime friend and neighbor, Mark Thatcher, the son Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister. Mann was sentenced to seven years in prison for his role; Thatcher is still under investigation as an alleged financier of the plot.


And,

http://www.defenselink.mil/policy/isa/africa/IPOA.htm

Theresa Whelan
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs
Remarks to IPOA Dinner
19 November 2003
Washington, D.C.

What Doug asked me to speak on tonight was our experiences from a DoD perspective in using contractors in Africa in supporting US government objectives.

<snip>

In Africa, as I mentioned, we’re using contractors in a variety of ways, in both logistics and training support.

First, I’m going to focus on the logistics support. Let me start with a couple of examples. Contractors provided support in Somalia in 1992 despite a challenging lack of infrastructure. It was one of the early places that Brown and Root really sunk its teeth into the logistics support business for the US military.

Since the 1990’s, contractors have been used extensively in peace support operations in Africa to provide logistical support to African soldiers. Since those early days of supporting ECOMOG, the Economic Community of West African States monitoring group in Liberia, an operation which launched the idea of sub-regional peacekeeping in Africa, contractors have deployed to support U.S. Government operations in Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and again, this past summer in Liberia.

The use of contractors, in Africa, is an example of necessity driving policy. The 1990’s saw not only an up-tick in crises in Africa in the Post-Cold War environment, but also an up-tick in crises around the world. This led to our pressing for more regional based PKO operations in order to cover the wide range of crises that had to be addressed. However, those regional forces had some inherent operational weaknesses ---they couldn’t do it entirely on their own --- they needed to get Western support. We wanted to support those operations, however, we also realized that our forces were tied down elsewhere around the globe and they might not be available for the long-term deployments we were envisioning in some places in Africa, as well as in other areas of the world.

[Stephanie]

20. interesting

so you are thinking Feith is about to be implicated in the Equatorial Guinea coup attempt? So many scandals so little time.

[Roland99]

22. One can only hope!

[jswordy]

11. That was really good news when I saw it!

But the bad part is, they wanted him to stay on! Man, we are gonna make a hard right turn here after the confirmation process is done. With plenty of Democratic help, judging by Condi's wave-through.

[bear425]

12. Isn't he a PNAC'er? n/t

On edit:

Here's an article from Slate

Douglas Feith
What has the Pentagon's third man done wrong? Everything.
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Thursday, May 20, 2004, at 3:56 PM PT

Of all the revelations that have surfaced about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal so far, the least surprising is that Douglas Feith may be partly responsible. Not a single Iraq war screw-up has gone by without someone tagging Feith—who, as the Defense Department's undersecretary for policy, is the Pentagon's No. 3 civilian, after Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz—as the guy to blame. Feith, who ranks with Wolfowitz in purity of neoconservative fervor, has turned out to be Michael Dukakis in reverse: ideology without competence.
- more-

http://slate.msn.com/id/2100899/

[Roland99]

15. One of the most evil.

[Stephanie]

18. Total PNAC'er - ran the OSP

Neo-con.

[bear425]

24. Gotcha, I think this resignation has more to it than just

"wanting to spend more time with the family". Could he be going behind the scenes to further the PNAC agenda in Iran?

[Roland99]

25. I think we should keep tabs on his contacts with Richard Perle

[Darknyte7]

16. Can't say I'm sorry to see him go...

In the reported words of General Tommy Franks in refering to Feith:

“I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day.” (Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 281.)

[semillama]

23. holy crap, that's funny as hell

That's got to be one of the best quotes about a bushco toadie I've ever read.

[Roland99]

26. I need to finish reading that book!!