Books : War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism

Rating: - Can't blame the guy
I don't blame Feith for all the distortions and finger-pointing in this book. If I had hurt the country that badly, I don't know if I would have had the courage to come clean about it, either.

At my first duty station I helped take care of wounded service members who had bled in large part due to the incompetence of Feith and his cronies. Most of these guys looked too young to shave regularly, but they were brave enough to walk into the face of death if they thought it helped the country.

One of the few things they expected in return for their service was a moderate amount of competence. They also expected honesty. This book shows the author to have neither.

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Rating: - Douglas Feith & the Bush/Cheney Disinformation network
Logic and facts did not stop the Bush administration from looking for connections. Vice President Cheney promoted a theory that Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was really an Iraqi doppelganger who had assumed Yousef's identity. The administration circulated as authentic a raw intelligence report, apparently from an alcoholic and discredited agent, that had the September 11 mastermind, Mohamed Atta, meeting with an Iraqi embassy official in Prague in 2000. (There is no evidence that Atta went to Prague.) Not satisfied with the conclusions of the intelligence professionals at the CIA and his own Defense Intelligence Agency, Secretary Rumsfeld set up the Office of Special Plans, staffed by ideologically vetted political appointees and reporting to Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith, with the mission of finding the link between Saddam and Al Qaeda that the intelligence professionals had supposedly missed.

President Bush simply asserted that Iraq was integral to the war on terror. He had no basis for his claim before the war, but he turned out to be prematurely correct. As a result of the American invasion, Sunni fundamentalist terrorists have flooded into Iraq. The Sunni Arab center of Iraq has become what Afghanistan was during the Taliban--an inaccessible region dominated by shadowy figures that now host foreign terrorists linked to Al Qaeda. By staging spectacular attacks, the terrorists have given Al Qaeda new strength and have helped generate thousands of new recruits. The foreign terrorists have done real damage to the prospect for a successful outcome in Iraq.

SOURCE: Peter Galbraith, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), page 80.

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Rating: - Boring Revisionist "History"
This volume is an attempt to cover the tracks of a gang of immoral, devious, vicious, neocons who fabricated the evidence and devised the strategy of propaganda used to propel the US into an illegal war. Feith was one of many back-room boys who fed a dim president the words that were used to sell the Iraq fiasco.
Watch him squirm and whine when interviewed by Jon Stewart.
In a proper and just World Feith would be made to stand before a Court and defend a charge of War Criminal.
Don't buy this book. He should not benefit from evil.

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Rating: - A Quartet; Terrorist, CIA, Dept State & Media
Wow this is an important definiton of managed major media news -- as well ad the agenda driven, risk adverse CIA and Department of State -- "Let's go along and get along, we will pay the consequences some other time" and "My mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts.

I marvel at the detail of notes and memory of the author -- some times a bit more than needed to make the point. So, we are required to do a bit of digging through the meetings and conversations to get to the meat. But so be it.

The author also defines that one of the unfortunate points in the Iraq war coverage is the administration's lack of P.R. capabilities, leaving the public to the twisted interpretation of the initiation and conduct of the war to the major news media.

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Rating: - I read this book too
Fact #1: State Dept is competent & trustworthy (anonymous sources say so)
Fact #2: CIA is competent & trustworthy (anonymous sources say so)
Fact #3: DoD is secretive and incompetent (anonymous sources say so)
So how can anyone write a book that disproves those facts?
Well, actually, it turns out it's really really easy to disprove those facts.