Back to the Neoconservatives (3)
Jihad el Khazen, Al-Hayat
December 28, 2005
I sometimes engage in comparisons among the neoconservatives and ask: Which of them is the worst? There's no answer; each one is worse than the next. All of them entered the administration to work for the benefit of Israel, at the expense of the US' own interests. However, I return to the original question and find Douglas Feith close to the top of the list, each time. His name has never once dropped from the number 3 position in terms of badness, extremism, or being an anti-peace Israeli Likudnik.
This summer, Feith resigned from his position as Deputy Secretary of Defense. In this column I wrote that an official who cooked up intelligence information to justify a war against Iraq should not be allowed to leave his post without an official investigation, or without standing trial. I consider him one of those responsible for killing 100,000 Iraqis and more than 2,000 Americans until now in a war whose pretexts were completely false. Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, a relationship with al-Qaida, or a nuclear program of any kind.
The traditional US intelligence agencies were unable to provide the information required to wage war, so the Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, and Feith created the Office of Special Plans, under Feith's supervision, to provide the required information. It was served up on demand by Ahmad Chalabi and other Iraqi agents, while Chalabi received a monthly salary of $340,000 from the CIA, even after the occupation of Iraq. That's how people from the Iraqi National Congress provided false information on chemical and biological weapons and a nuclear program; there was focus on Iraq's alleged relations with al-Qaida, and on joint efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
In this column, I protested that Feith was escaping without going on trial. I was very happy to learn recently that the Pentagon's inspector general agreed to a congressional request for an investigation into the intelligence information that Feith submitted to the White House in the run-up to the war. I read that the inspector general told the Senate on 19 November that he had decided to investigate Feith's information after receiving a request from Republican members of the Intelligence Committee, and another request from Democratic members.
While the inspector general's office has pledged to speed up the investigation, sources from the office say that the process requires at least 6 months. Personally, I don't expect that an official at the Pentagon will prove Feith's guilt, since he didn't act alone. The accusation will certainly reach Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who always insisted that information on Iraq's weapons and ties with al-Qaida were certain, and free of any suspicion.
Feith is a lawyer and before his work in government, was half of the law office of Feith and Zell. It was a small office, with only one international branch. Where? Israel, of course. Most of the firm's work involved representing Israeli interests. At first, its webpage clearly mentioned this relationship and said that Feith "represents Israeli weapons production firms." However, after he was appointed to the Pentagon, the website concealed these earlier web pages, and the firm changed its name to Zell and Goldberg.
I read that this firm promoted the work of an Iraqi international law group, which described itself as wanting to help businessmen interested in entering the Iraqi market. Time magazine described Feith's role in granting contracts; in an issue last year, Time printed an article entitled "The Paper Trail: Did Cheney Approve a Deal?" It quoted Stephen Browning of the US Army Corps of Engineers as saying that Feith approved a contract to build pipelines. Browning said that he and General Jay Garner, the official in charge of the US occupation of Iraq before Paul Bremer, met with Feith, who told them that he approved the contract for Halliburton, Cheney's old company, without any invitation to tender.
Salem Chalabi was responsible for the Iraq International Law Group and his uncle Ahmad made things easy in the Governing Council for which Salem Chalabi worked as a legal adviser. The group said in its own propaganda on the net that it represented some big firms and institutions in the world. There are companies that claim to provide advice, but the group was in Iraq and worked closely with the Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraq's Governing Council and the new Oil and Labor and Social Affairs Ministries.
Thus, after Douglas Feith represented Israeli arms companies and entered government to destroy Iraq, he left government, acting as innocent as could be, and went back to work for the law firm, benefiting materially from the souls of dead Iraqis and their destroyed country.
I ask myself this time, which one is more of a nasty scoundrel - Douglas Feith or Ahmad Chalabi? When the Iraqi Group was formed, it wasn't registered in Salem Chalabi's name, but that of Mark Zell. It had the same address as Zell and Goldberg. The National Journal quoted Salem Chalabi as saying that the Iraqi Group was like a "marketing advisor" that contacted law firms in Washington and New York, asking them if their clients were interested in working in Iraq.
This matches with statements by Zell and Goldberg that they set up a "task force" to follow up opportunities that arose after the end of the war in Iraq.
Ahmad Chalabi deserves to go on trial; he was a principal player in the lies and falsification that led to the destruction of Iraq. This charge is much more important than fraud, for example, or trying to benefit at the expense of the lives of Iraqis.
Frankly, I don't expect quick results. The White House is defending every official who has faced accusations, because the fingers of blame will continue to point upward. However, I expect that the American regime, thanks to its justice, democracy and long-standing institutions, won't let the crime go unpunished. Perhaps we might have to wait for the next administration to see justice. We will have to wait and see.
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