Isn’t this the type of website someone usually puts up when they’ve just been indicted and need to start collecting donations from people who owe them favors? It looks shockingly like the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Fund website.
Also, Feith should fire his publicist and web designer immediately. The way that page is laid out, the very first words to catch my eye after “Douglas Feith” were “Bush lied, people died”.
What a tool. Apparently “challenging” intelligence in Feith’s narrow mind equates to rewriting it to conform to one’s worldview.
For those of us who’ve worked in the intelligence world professionally, we expect to be challenged and have our assumptions questioned. We expect to take criticism and be able to substantively defend our analytical products. But instead of actual criticism, Feith wrote his own “analysis” and farmed it out guised as criticism. Pathetic.
TS | March 1, 2007
Agreed.
With the CIA’s excellent track record (slam dunk!) no one should dare question the dogmatic assumptions through which it filters intelligence.
Let’s apply FIFO (Feith in , Feith Out) principles to this!
nzruss | March 1, 2007
Readers may also wish to check the ‘media myths vs facts’ link (top RH side)
Spoiler: ‘um, yeah, those, well, er, I have some people on it’
Max Postman | March 1, 2007
My favorite part is “Welcome to this Website” on the front page. That’s like titling a paper “The Paper You Are Currently Reading.”
calipygian | March 1, 2007
With regards to Doug Feith’s alleged patriotism, I have to side with Juan Cole on this one:“I believe that Doug Feith, for instance, has dual loyalties to the Israeli Likud Party and to the U.S. Republican Party. He thinks that their interests are completely congruent. And I also think that if he has to choose, he will put the interests of the Likud above the interests of the Republican Party.
I don’t think there is anything a priori wrong with Feith being so devoted to the Likud Party. That is his prerogative. But as an American, I don’t want a person with those sentiments to serve as the number 3 man in the Pentagon. I frankly don’t trust him to put America first. ”
“But the ‘Bush lied, people died’ argument is not true.”
Of course it’s not true! Bush didn’t lie and no one died!
Arthur Fitzgerald | March 2, 2007
I think it is higly inappropriate to focus the blame on Feith and his colleagues. Their work was no better or worse that that of the US intelligence community. Of course Feith was politically motivated, but the IC proved incapable of collecting any viable evidence against his argument.The problem is not the presence of a militarist conspiracy, but the impotence of American intelligence services. This does not absolve the administration from its share of the blame, but it is necessary to understand the context within which the decisions were and are being made. As for the charge of dual loyalty, it is blatant anti-Semitism which contributes nothing to the debate.
You seem to suggest that analysis by professionals based on the best available information is somehow equivalent to Feith’s trolling of intelligence databases to find information to support his hypothesis. They are not.
Methodology is important, but so is the intelligence requirement that analysis is supposed to answer. Intelligence people attempt to answer questions and fill gaps in information, not test hypotheses. If I remember correctly, the requirement in question prior to 2003 went something like: “What is the nature and extent of any relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq?” That’s an entirely appropriate requirement for intelligence to answer. Feith, on the other hand, began not with a question or an identified gap in knowledge, but with a hypothesis formed from the policy he advocated. When the intelligence from the IC did not support his position he formed his own group to search for information that would, giving little consideration to the information’s validity. Information that discounted or contradicted his hypothesis was dismissed or diminished in importance. It’s a classic case of confirmation bias.
In the end, the CIA analysis of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties was largely accurate while Feith’s was not.
Unlike some, I willing to give Feith some benefit of the doubt – perhaps he really thought he was doing the right thing, but it illustrates the importance of keeping intelligence analysis separate from policy. Policy people, like Feith, should not be doing intelligence analysis because they aren’t trained to critically examine evidence, but they also have a stake, and therefore a conflict of interest, in what the intelligence says. You can hardly expect someone who’s an advocate for a certain policy to look at the data and come to the conclusion the foundation of that policy is wrong.
So intel people have no business mucking about in policy and policy people have no business mucking about in intel. The policy-intel separation has broken down in recent years for a variety of reasons (not just political). For the interests of all involved, it needs serious strengthening. Feith is certainly an obstacle and it’s good he’s gone from government.
Steve | March 2, 2007
“I think it is higly inappropriate to focus the blame on Feith and his colleagues. Their work was no better or worse that that of the US intelligence community.”
Are you kidding? Cheney, Rumsfeld and Feith set up a shadow CIA in the Pentagon to doctor and/or fabricate intel to justify an invasion of Iraq. They also put the heavy lean on Tenet, and even on mid-level intel analysts, to come up with conclusions favorable to the case for war.
I’m not making this up, and it’s nothing new. Frontline did a terrific program called “The Dark Side” almost a year ago laying it all out.
…and we all know if PBS says it, it must be true. Please. There are important things for which Feith can be criticized. This isn’t one of them. Andy’s assumptions about Feith’s intentions and the conduct of the analysts that worked for him are unsupported and unfair. The IC is there to support policy-makers and answer their questions (not of course to give them the answers that they want, but to address the questions that they ask). Feith may not have felt that he was being properly supported by an IC that can’t recognize its own groupthink and institutional shortcomings(that would also be an assumption about Feith’s intentions but it obviously leads you to different conclusions, doesn’t it?). If Feith and Co. got it wrong, it is without doubt on them, but let’s not imagine nefarious intentions where none need exist. The IC wasn’t born on a sacred mountain under double rainbows like Kim Jong Il; they are frequently wrong, slow to change course, and often unable to disassociate their agenda from the political ju-jitsu that is decision-making in Washington (how often does it appear that the IC leaks to embarass any administration that has discounted its view). IC judgements aren’t written in stone, they are negotiated; oftentimes producing sound, valid assessments. But interagency BOGSATs shouldn’t be confused with the Oracle of Delphi (however akin to staring at chicken entrails the process may be…). Perhaps if his critics made fewer conspiratorial assumptions, the guy wouldn’t feel compelled to defend his patriotism. Why not accuse him of murdering Vince Foster, that way the Clinton-haters and the Bush-haters can all join hands…
Lucabrazi, you’ve completely mischaracterized what I said. I don’t know what Feith’s intent was and I don’t assume he was some kind of evil plotter deliberately and consciously using unsupported intelligence to promote his policies. Whatever his intent, his methods were flawed and wrong and his conclusions have also proven false.
And I certainly have never suggested the IC was “born on a sacred” mountain. If you’d read my comment, you’d know that I believe criticism is extremely important in combating the cognitive and other biases that are inevitably a part of intelligence work. Combating those biases is why intelligence analysts use methodologies designed to limit them. Policy people are trained to do the opposite, which is why they should not be doing analysis. If a policymaker is unhappy or disagrees with with an assessment, should they have different analysts take another look (or use an alternative analysis methodology) or do it him/herself?
What Feith did was not criticism – it was reanalysis. That’s the problem.
Arthur Fitzgerald | March 3, 2007
Andy, the very problem is that Feith’s trolling is equivalent to CIA analysis. The IC posessed no substantive information which could contribute to either side of the debate, so both the CIA and Feith recycled old data, albeit in different ways.
Everything went haywire at the moment that the administration realised that the IC could not close the knowledge gap one way or another. This opened the way for Feith and company to come in and put forward their worst case scenario. In a situation where new information is absent while political pressure is building, confirmation bias is virtually guaranteed.
Policy and intel should be kept well separated, but there should be a credible intel side to the debate. At the moment the IC has gone some way towards correcting the analysis flaws of the Cold War period, but has lost its ability to collect viable information on critical issues. The best example of this is the current “5-10 years” assessment of Iran’s nuclear programme. Yet again, the IC doesn’t posess credible evidence either way, but refuses to acknowledge this.
The IC has a duty to collect critical information regardless of difficulty. It is failing in that duty.
Jim | March 4, 2007
“posessed no substantive information which could contribute to either side of the debate”
Why must intel contribute to a side of a political debate?
“there should be a credible intel side to the debate.”
How do Feith’s actions fall into line with this statement at all? How was his “analysis” credible?
Read the Downing Street memo. “The facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Feith started out with a conclusion: regime change in Iraq. So he wasn’t interested in any kind of “objective anaylsis” of “intelligence” etc when he had a priori conclusion.
People seem to forget the anti-war movement before the war started was right: Iraq had no WMD. Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector, was totally ignored by the likes of John Kerry and others in Washington even though he personally hand delivered reports that he had written that proved that. Iraq’s industrial capacity by the end of the 1990s was so low that it couldn’t sustain or create WMDs of any sort.
Gridlock | March 1, 2007
Well, he had to quote Peter Pace rather than Tommy Franks really, didn’t he?
The bit I like best is the “Media myths and facts” page, whose sole contents right now is
“MEDIA MYTHS VS. FACTS
More information coming soon”
I’m guessing his stovepipes aren’t quite as quick, these days?
Maybe he can Colin Powell to help him out?
Jeremy | March 1, 2007
Don’t miss Feith’s other webpage: http://webpages.charter.net/micah/feith/feith.htm
My favorite line: “I just repeated whatever Ahmad Chalabi told me to say. He gave me doughnuts.”
Haninah | March 1, 2007
Isn’t this the type of website someone usually puts up when they’ve just been indicted and need to start collecting donations from people who owe them favors? It looks shockingly like the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Fund website.
Also, Feith should fire his publicist and web designer immediately. The way that page is laid out, the very first words to catch my eye after “Douglas Feith” were “Bush lied, people died”.
Andy | March 1, 2007
What a tool. Apparently “challenging” intelligence in Feith’s narrow mind equates to rewriting it to conform to one’s worldview.
For those of us who’ve worked in the intelligence world professionally, we expect to be challenged and have our assumptions questioned. We expect to take criticism and be able to substantively defend our analytical products. But instead of actual criticism, Feith wrote his own “analysis” and farmed it out guised as criticism. Pathetic.
TS | March 1, 2007
Agreed.
With the CIA’s excellent track record (slam dunk!) no one should dare question the dogmatic assumptions through which it filters intelligence.
Smith | March 1, 2007
Let’s apply FIFO (Feith in , Feith Out) principles to this!
nzruss | March 1, 2007
Readers may also wish to check the ‘media myths vs facts’ link (top RH side)
Spoiler: ‘um, yeah, those, well, er, I have some people on it’
Max Postman | March 1, 2007
My favorite part is “Welcome to this Website” on the front page. That’s like titling a paper “The Paper You Are Currently Reading.”
calipygian | March 1, 2007
With regards to Doug Feith’s alleged patriotism, I have to side with Juan Cole on this one:“I believe that Doug Feith, for instance, has dual loyalties to the Israeli Likud Party and to the U.S. Republican Party. He thinks that their interests are completely congruent. And I also think that if he has to choose, he will put the interests of the Likud above the interests of the Republican Party.
I don’t think there is anything a priori wrong with Feith being so devoted to the Likud Party. That is his prerogative. But as an American, I don’t want a person with those sentiments to serve as the number 3 man in the Pentagon. I frankly don’t trust him to put America first. ”
http://www.juancole.com/2004/09/dual-loyalties-many-readers-have.html
Binh | March 2, 2007
“But the ‘Bush lied, people died’ argument is not true.”
Of course it’s not true! Bush didn’t lie and no one died!
Arthur Fitzgerald | March 2, 2007
I think it is higly inappropriate to focus the blame on Feith and his colleagues. Their work was no better or worse that that of the US intelligence community. Of course Feith was politically motivated, but the IC proved incapable of collecting any viable evidence against his argument.The problem is not the presence of a militarist conspiracy, but the impotence of American intelligence services. This does not absolve the administration from its share of the blame, but it is necessary to understand the context within which the decisions were and are being made. As for the charge of dual loyalty, it is blatant anti-Semitism which contributes nothing to the debate.
Andy | March 2, 2007
Arthur,
You seem to suggest that analysis by professionals based on the best available information is somehow equivalent to Feith’s trolling of intelligence databases to find information to support his hypothesis. They are not.
Methodology is important, but so is the intelligence requirement that analysis is supposed to answer. Intelligence people attempt to answer questions and fill gaps in information, not test hypotheses. If I remember correctly, the requirement in question prior to 2003 went something like: “What is the nature and extent of any relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq?” That’s an entirely appropriate requirement for intelligence to answer. Feith, on the other hand, began not with a question or an identified gap in knowledge, but with a hypothesis formed from the policy he advocated. When the intelligence from the IC did not support his position he formed his own group to search for information that would, giving little consideration to the information’s validity. Information that discounted or contradicted his hypothesis was dismissed or diminished in importance. It’s a classic case of confirmation bias.
In the end, the CIA analysis of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties was largely accurate while Feith’s was not.
Unlike some, I willing to give Feith some benefit of the doubt – perhaps he really thought he was doing the right thing, but it illustrates the importance of keeping intelligence analysis separate from policy. Policy people, like Feith, should not be doing intelligence analysis because they aren’t trained to critically examine evidence, but they also have a stake, and therefore a conflict of interest, in what the intelligence says. You can hardly expect someone who’s an advocate for a certain policy to look at the data and come to the conclusion the foundation of that policy is wrong.
So intel people have no business mucking about in policy and policy people have no business mucking about in intel. The policy-intel separation has broken down in recent years for a variety of reasons (not just political). For the interests of all involved, it needs serious strengthening. Feith is certainly an obstacle and it’s good he’s gone from government.
Steve | March 2, 2007
“I think it is higly inappropriate to focus the blame on Feith and his colleagues. Their work was no better or worse that that of the US intelligence community.”
Are you kidding? Cheney, Rumsfeld and Feith set up a shadow CIA in the Pentagon to doctor and/or fabricate intel to justify an invasion of Iraq. They also put the heavy lean on Tenet, and even on mid-level intel analysts, to come up with conclusions favorable to the case for war.
I’m not making this up, and it’s nothing new. Frontline did a terrific program called “The Dark Side” almost a year ago laying it all out.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/
lucabrazi | March 3, 2007
…and we all know if PBS says it, it must be true. Please. There are important things for which Feith can be criticized. This isn’t one of them. Andy’s assumptions about Feith’s intentions and the conduct of the analysts that worked for him are unsupported and unfair. The IC is there to support policy-makers and answer their questions (not of course to give them the answers that they want, but to address the questions that they ask). Feith may not have felt that he was being properly supported by an IC that can’t recognize its own groupthink and institutional shortcomings(that would also be an assumption about Feith’s intentions but it obviously leads you to different conclusions, doesn’t it?). If Feith and Co. got it wrong, it is without doubt on them, but let’s not imagine nefarious intentions where none need exist. The IC wasn’t born on a sacred mountain under double rainbows like Kim Jong Il; they are frequently wrong, slow to change course, and often unable to disassociate their agenda from the political ju-jitsu that is decision-making in Washington (how often does it appear that the IC leaks to embarass any administration that has discounted its view). IC judgements aren’t written in stone, they are negotiated; oftentimes producing sound, valid assessments. But interagency BOGSATs shouldn’t be confused with the Oracle of Delphi (however akin to staring at chicken entrails the process may be…). Perhaps if his critics made fewer conspiratorial assumptions, the guy wouldn’t feel compelled to defend his patriotism. Why not accuse him of murdering Vince Foster, that way the Clinton-haters and the Bush-haters can all join hands…
Andy | March 3, 2007
Lucabrazi, you’ve completely mischaracterized what I said. I don’t know what Feith’s intent was and I don’t assume he was some kind of evil plotter deliberately and consciously using unsupported intelligence to promote his policies. Whatever his intent, his methods were flawed and wrong and his conclusions have also proven false.
And I certainly have never suggested the IC was “born on a sacred” mountain. If you’d read my comment, you’d know that I believe criticism is extremely important in combating the cognitive and other biases that are inevitably a part of intelligence work. Combating those biases is why intelligence analysts use methodologies designed to limit them. Policy people are trained to do the opposite, which is why they should not be doing analysis. If a policymaker is unhappy or disagrees with with an assessment, should they have different analysts take another look (or use an alternative analysis methodology) or do it him/herself?
What Feith did was not criticism – it was reanalysis. That’s the problem.
Arthur Fitzgerald | March 3, 2007
Andy, the very problem is that Feith’s trolling is equivalent to CIA analysis. The IC posessed no substantive information which could contribute to either side of the debate, so both the CIA and Feith recycled old data, albeit in different ways.
Everything went haywire at the moment that the administration realised that the IC could not close the knowledge gap one way or another. This opened the way for Feith and company to come in and put forward their worst case scenario. In a situation where new information is absent while political pressure is building, confirmation bias is virtually guaranteed.
Policy and intel should be kept well separated, but there should be a credible intel side to the debate. At the moment the IC has gone some way towards correcting the analysis flaws of the Cold War period, but has lost its ability to collect viable information on critical issues. The best example of this is the current “5-10 years” assessment of Iran’s nuclear programme. Yet again, the IC doesn’t posess credible evidence either way, but refuses to acknowledge this.
The IC has a duty to collect critical information regardless of difficulty. It is failing in that duty.
Jim | March 4, 2007
“posessed no substantive information which could contribute to either side of the debate”
Why must intel contribute to a side of a political debate?
“there should be a credible intel side to the debate.”
How do Feith’s actions fall into line with this statement at all? How was his “analysis” credible?
Binh | March 13, 2007
Read the Downing Street memo. “The facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Feith started out with a conclusion: regime change in Iraq. So he wasn’t interested in any kind of “objective anaylsis” of “intelligence” etc when he had a priori conclusion.
People seem to forget the anti-war movement before the war started was right: Iraq had no WMD. Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector, was totally ignored by the likes of John Kerry and others in Washington even though he personally hand delivered reports that he had written that proved that. Iraq’s industrial capacity by the end of the 1990s was so low that it couldn’t sustain or create WMDs of any sort.