Inquiry Must Cover Cheney Feith Bush

Inquiry Must cover Cheney, Feith

The Bush Administration will probably attempt to dump all the blame for the WMD fiasco on the CIA. As many are saying, this move is highly ironic. Every evidence is that Doug Feith and his Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon made an end run around the CIA and the DIA, cherry-picked intelligence, and funneled it to Cheney, who then manipulated Bush with it. (W. admits to not reading the newspapers, so he is at the mercy of his close advisers for information, for all the world like an illiterate medieval king with crafty ministers!)

To make George Tenet take the fall for all this, when his analysts were relatively careful in their assessments, and to let Feith and Cheney off the hook, would be the height of injustice. Ironically, Feith leaked some of the most damaging evidence against him to the The Weekly Standard, a listing of implausible cherry-picked reports about supposed Saddam-al-Qaeda links. If this is the sort of thing that was being given to Cheney and pressed on Bush, no wonder the administration made such faulty policy.

See the excellent summary in Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, “The Lie Factor,” Mother Jones, January/February 2004, January 26, 2004