DOUGLAS FEITH ONE OF THE 'BUSH SIX' WAR CRIMINALS

The Bench  http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/04/13/090413ta_talk_mayer  The Bush Six, Jane Mayer 

 

Philippe Sands

April 13, 2009

DOUGLAS FEITH

About a year ago, a book came out in England that made a fascinating prediction: at some point in the future, the author wrote, six top officials in the Bush Administration would get a tap on the shoulder announcing that they were being arrested on international charges of torture. 

If the prediction seemed improbable, the background of the book’s author was even more so. Philippe Sands is neither a journalist nor an American but a law professor and a certified Queen’s Counsel (the kind of barrister who on occasion wears a powdered horsehair wig) who works at the same law practice as Cherie Blair. Sands’s book, “Torture Team,” offers a scathing critique of officials in the Bush Administration, accusing them of complicity in acts of torture. When the book appeared, some scoffed. Douglas Feith, a former Pentagon official, dismissed Sands as “a British lawyer” who “wrote an extremely dishonest book.”

Last week, Sands’s accusations suddenly did not seem so outlandish. A Spanish court took the first steps toward starting a criminal investigation of the same six former Bush Administration officials he had named, weighing charges that they had enabled and abetted torture by justifying the abuse of terrorism suspects. Among those whom the court singled out was Feith, the former Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, along with former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer; and David Addington, the chief of staff and the principal legal adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

In Washington the other night, over a cup of camomile tea, Sands described the behind-the-scenes role he played in spurring the Spanish court to action. He paced his hotel room, seeming by turns proud and stunned at what he had done. “This is the end of these people’s professional reputations!” he said. “This is no joke. We’re talking about the serious potential deprivation of liberty.”

Sands said that he had “no personal vendetta” against the Bush Administration, but he does see a link between his family history and his chosen profession. His mother and her parents were Viennese Jews who barely survived the Holocaust; his mother spent the first seven years of her life in hiding, away from her family. “It inculcated a burning sense of being aggrieved at wrongdoing, and at the failure of people to take responsibility for their actions,” Sands said.

Sands got his first chance to demonstrate his convictions professionally in 1998. He was in Paris, for the unveiling of his grandfather’s gravestone, when he received a call asking him to represent Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. He told his wife, Natalia Schiffrin, about the offer. “Philippe, if you do,” Sands recalls her saying, “I will divorce you!” (She is American, and the daughter of the book publisher André Schiffrin, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society.) Sands declined the case.

Instead, he signed on to represent the other side, and helped pursue Pinochet for violations of international law. The case became a turning point in international law, establishing the principle that there is no immunity even for the highest-ranking former government officials when they are accused of torture. Pinochet spent some sixteen months under house arrest. A decade later, the same Spanish judge who initiated the legal proceedings against Pinochet, Baltasar Garzón, has been assigned to the case against the Bush Administration officials.

The current torture case began in the spring of 2004, when photographs of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib surfaced. Sands said that he read the protestations of innocence from Bush Administration officials, who blamed a few “bad apples” for the incidents, with the eye of a barrister. He recalled, “I could spot right away that they were speaking as advocates of a cause. So I decided to find out what really happened.” While keeping up his busy law practice, he travelled to America to interview the key players in what he described as “a writing project I am engaged in on international law and the war on terror.” Many Bush officials, including Feith and William J. Haynes II, the former Pentagon general counsel, who was also named in the Spanish lawsuit, agreed to meet with Sands, perhaps expecting a friendly chat. “I spent two years trekking around the country, finding out that they were manifestly untruthful,” Sands said. “I’ve got a particular bugbear about lawyers,” he added. “If not for lawyers, none of these abuses would have ever occurred.”

 

As Sands went about his research, he conferred with human-rights experts all over Europe on his findings. Word spread that he had the makings of a high-level war-crimes case. Sands won’t reveal exactly which human-rights authorities he consulted. But, in recent months, one of them was Gonzalo Boye, the Chilean-born Spanish lawyer who last week filed the criminal complaint against the Bush officials, on behalf of five former prisoners who were, they allege, tortured in the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. Boye said last week of Sands, “Let me just say that he played a very big role in my thinking. His book showed me who the targets were.” Feith, reached on the phone, called Sands’s book “wildly inaccurate.” He said, “It’s not a happy thing for the Spanish Court to think of prosecuting Americans for advice they gave to the President of the United States!”

It is hard to predict what will happen next, but, if arrest warrants are issued, the Obama Administration may be forced either to extradite the former officials or to start its own investigation. Sands, who admires Obama, said, “I regret that I have added to his in-box when he has so much else to sort out. But I hope he does the right thing. There’s not much dispute anymore: torture happened, and the law is clear—torture must be punished.”

Meanwhile, Sands reiterated a warning that he made in his book. “If I were they,” he said, referring to the former officials in question, “I would think carefully before setting foot outside the United States. They are now, and forever in the future, at risk of arrest. Until this is sorted out, they are in their own legal black hole.” ♦

http://www.globalresearch.ca/foreign-affairs-article-against-international-justice-forgets-to-mention-douglas-feith-was-investigated-for-bush-era-torture/5345417
 
Last weekend, one need not have looked further than the Foreign Affairs homepage for a little bit of political humor. There readers will find a lengthy, circumspect article authoritatively titled, “The War of Law: How New International Law Undermines Democratic Sovereignty.”

The piece begins with applause for the Senate’s decision last December to reject the the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, before critiquing a trend sustained by some legal scholars, called legal transnationalism, which favors enshrining articulated international norms of justice in national judiciaries.

The punchline can be found in the byline. The article was coauthored by Jon Kyl, John Fonte, and — prepare to laugh, those in the know — Douglas Feith. Not simply some sort of detached scholar, devoted professional, or principled activist, the latter author would appear to have a direct stake in the outcome of the global debate on legal transnationalism given the clear threat posed to him by potential criminal charges.

Former undersecretary of defense for policy in the Bush administration, Feith is often remembered for heading a group prior to the Iraq War which “developed, produced, and then disseminated” intelligence assessments contradicting the CIA’s conclusions. The group, called the Office of Special Plans, attempted to allege a nonexistent link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. The Defense Department’s inspector general subsequently issued a report on Feith’s group finding it to have engaged in “inappropriate” intelligence activities, although none were in violation of any DOD directives or American law.

But Feith the multitasker apparently found it difficult to shake an aura of criminality. Relevant to the Foreign Affairs article of interest, he also happens to be one of the Bush Six, a group of the aforementioned administration’s legal advisers subject to a criminal investigation initiated in 2009 by a court in Spain for their alleged role in enabling and abetting the torture of terrorism suspects.>>CONTINUE>>http://www.globalresearch.ca/foreign-affairs-article-against-international-justice-forgets-to-mention-douglas-feith-was-investigated-for-bush-era-torture/5345417

http://www.seedsofdoubt.com/distressedamerican/swamprat2.htm 

http://theinfounderground.com/smf/index.php?topic=17058.0 

The Information Underground

My Klassmate, the War Kriminal



Feith on Time Magazine Cover

I went to High School in Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love. The school I went to was, at the time, rated either #1 or #2 as the 'best academic High School in the nation'. 95% of our graduates went on to college, many to Ivy League schools, other sto big colleges like UCLA or to big state colleges like Michigan, Penn State and the like. I took a different path in life, one which I sometimes question, but that's the way life is.

One of my classmates, in fact he was in my History class, was the neo-con chicken hawk and opportunist Douglas Feith. Feith became Under Secretary of Defense in the Bush Administration, and also National Security Advisor. He was also a signatory of the infamous PNAC (Project for a New American Century) document, the document which laid out the agenda for 9-11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 'War on Terror' and, ultimately, the final implosion of the American economy. Feith has prospered greatly from ass-licking, bureaucratic weaseling and a general lack of respect for humanity along with a disconnect from reality. He is a dual Israeli-American citizen.

I had forgotten about Feith for years. In fact, it was only when a former classmate who I am still in touch with brought him to my attention a couple of years ago that I made the connection: It's THAT Doug Feith!

Central High School, Philadelphia

Feith was more or less a non-entity personality wise when I was aquainted with him. At our school, he belonged to a clique of 'upwardly mobile Jews' that stayed to themselves primarily. He belonged to the debate-club, and a couple of Jewish organizations. Interestingly, Feith didn't even live in Philadelphia, which supposedly was a requirement for attending our school. He lived in Cheltenhan, a Philly suburb, that was also the home of another famous Zionist, one Binyamim Netanyahu, future Israeli Prime Minister. Feith, as I said, was a bit of a 'non-entity', but he was 'pushy', like his clique of friends.

I was never friends with Feith, because we 'moved in different circles'.  :lol:  He wasn't in my homeroom. But, he was in my history class. And, ironically, he didn't seem to have much real interest or perspective on history back then. But he was just a kid.

Feith was usually quiet in History class. Our history teacher was Mr.Berlin. Berlin was a bit manic, and he his classes were sometimes the scene of heated debates. Mr. Berlin was a full-blooded Zionist Jew, and when the subject of Israel came up, you could expect at least a 20 minute rant. At the time, my opinion on Israel was basically neutral. One time, a Jewish friiend of mine named Mikey, who was also in the class, challenged Mr.Berlin on Israel's 'legitimacy' : then the fireworks really started. Berlin called Mikey a 'traitor and a piece of shit', and Mikey, who was one of the original 'punks' told the teacher 'Fuck You!'. They almost came to blows, and we had to pull them apart. Mikey was expelled from the class. As I remember, Feith said nothing.

In fact, the only notable words that I ever heard come out of Feith's mouth, came during a discussion of the Vietnam War, which was reaching a peak at this time (1967-71). Now, most of my friends and myself opposed this war: because of the pointlessness of the slaughter, the nebulous reasons for our being there, and because all of us were eligible for the draft right after graduation. During one particular discussion, Feith started talking about 'bombing Hanoi back to the Stone Age' (probably heard that from Nixon), 'wiping out the Communists', and 'stopping them there, before they come to our shores'. Of course, all this talk was complete nonsense, but since Feith was not a deep thinker, he probably believed it. Remember, this was about the time that some former 'red-diaper babies' or Trotskyites started morphing into 'neo-conservatives'. The former Trotskyites had made good money in various 'bourgeois' professions, and now they were 'changing'. Anyway, Douglas was not an original thinker.

So, in 1971, we all graduated. Most of the class went on to college. Feith went to Harvard, and later to Georetown. He did get very good grade in school. He worked hard; he pushed. Feith, of course, was never eligible for the draft, getting a deferment for going to Harvard. In this he was a 'bird of a feather' with the rest of the neo-con 'chicken hawks' who never ever served this country, other than feeding at the public trough, sucking up money from various foundations and corporate sponsors, or 'lawyering' for 'connected' law firms. But they have been good at a few things: Sending the children of America to their death in wars for profit & Israel; the wholescale slaughter of innocent Arabs & Muslims; treason against the country that made them rich and powerful; and having a general disdain for humanity.

Read the rest:
http://kultureamerika.weebly.com/1/post/2008/10/my-klassmate-the-war-kriminal.html#comments

Feith and Iraq contracts:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept05/Pringle0911.htm

Iraq 'Reconstruction': A Kosher 'affair': Even some liberal Jews object!
http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/002015.php

And here, please:

For instance, there was the Undersecretary of Defense, Doug Feith, largely credited for fabricating the tales that got the US into the war to begin with, along with his fellow neocons and best buddy, Ahmed Chalabi.

Feith was a partner with Marc Zell, in the Feith & Zell, DC law firm before joining the administration. After he left for the White House, Zell renamed the firm, Zell, Goldberg & Co, and teamed up with Salem Chalabi, Ahmed nephew, to solicit contracts for clients in Iraq. This scam operated under the name, "Iraqi International Law Group."

Mozel tov!

At the time, the National Journal quoted Salem as saying that Marc Zell was the firm's "marketing consultant" and had been contacting law firms in Washington and New York to ask if they had clients interested in doing business in Iraq.

According to its web site back then, the IILG was made up of lawyers and businessmen who "dared to take the lead in bringing private sector investment and experience" to the war-torn country and offered to "be your Professional Gateway to the New Iraq."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17547.htm

My Klassmate the War Kriminal: Zionist Douglas Feith

« on: December 16, 2012, 06:35:49 PM » Here is an essay I presented on my website, KULTURE/AMERIKA a few years ago...It is a true story....Douglas Feith was Bush II 'National Security Adviser' ans a signer of the infamous PNAC document...Feith also was deeply involved in the 'Iraqi Reconstruction Project' heist.