There is an old proverb in the country that is used to describe a man who wastes time and can’t get any thing done. It is said, “He runs around like a man in a silo looking for a corner to piss in.” Our president often reminds me of such a man; although it can be argued he flaunts our traditional system by making the EPA regulations into his own form of tyranny.

President Obama has just sent an email to his supporters, a group growing smaller and consequently requiring less cyber ink with the passage of time.

Obama claims to have a plan to get America back to work and he is asking for a joint session of congress to explain the plan.

He explains that it is ultimately up to congress to implement his plan and do what they were elected to do; apparently, in his opinion they were elected to be his rubber stamp.

Friend –

Today I asked for a joint session of Congress where I will lay out a clear plan to get Americans back to work.

Next week, I will deliver the details of the plan and call on lawmakers to pass it. Whether they will do the job they were elected to do is ultimately up to them.

But both you and I can pressure them to do the right thing. We can send the message that the American people are playing by the rules and meeting their responsibilities—and it’s time for our leaders in Congress to meet theirs. And we must hold them accountable if they don’t.

So I’m asking you to stand with me in calling on Congress to step up and take action on jobs:

http://my.barackobama.com/Time-To-Act

No matter how things go in the weeks and months ahead, this will be an important challenge for our organization.

It’s been a long time since Congress was focused on what the American people need them to be focused on. I know that you’re frustrated by that. I am, too. That’s why I’m putting forward a set of bipartisan proposals to help grow the economy and create jobs—that means strengthening our small businesses, giving needed breaks to middle-class families, while taking responsible steps to bring down our deficit. I’m asking lawmakers to look past short-term politics and take action on that plan. But we’ve got to do this together.

I will deliver this message to Congress next week, but I’m asking you to stand alongside me today:

http://my.barackobama.com/Time-To-Act

More to come,

Barack

I am sure the witless hordes are waiting breathlessly for marching orders from Dear Reader and I am sure they are impressed with the personal message that was written by one of his erudite saps he keeps around for the trivial and mundane tasks, like writing a note that people can read and understand.

He is on the ropes. He wasted two years with a health care plan that is a debacle and will hopefully be rewritten or thrown down the outhouse hole, and while he tied his useless and fiscally ruinous dream around the neck of the American public, he ignored the job crisis. Now he takes a public relations nightmare of an elitist vacation in a $50,000 a week resort, expecting America to pick up the tab and with total arrogance he and his wife fly out on separate jets spaced three hours apart, but in all fairness, he was concentrating on a plan to put America to work and his golf game. After giving our Affirmative Action President the benefit of the doubt for two years, it is time to unload on this dilettante who lives the life of luxury while unemployment edges closer to double digits.

He is blaming congress for his own inability to do something constructive, after he had control of both houses for two years.

He can run in circles for the next 14 months, but there are no magic corners in that silo of stupidity and arrogance.

Those are the words of George Soros. And he feels the United States must be destroyed.

George Soros was born György Schwartz in Hungary in 1930. Soros, born a Jew but now an atheist, was the son of a Nazi colloaborator and accompanied his father while the father assisted in the confiscation of private property from Jews. Through it all, he feels no guilt. In fact

KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.

SOROS: Yes. Yes.

KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.

SOROS: Yes. That’s right. Yes.

KROFT: I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?

SOROS: Not, not at all. Not at all.

KROFT: No feeling of guilt?

SOROS: No.

In 2004 Joshua Muravchik wrote that in 1944:

“70% of Mr. Soros’s fellow Jews in Hungary, nearly a half-million human beings, were annihilated in that year. They were dying and disappearing all around him, and their numbers no doubt included many whom he knew personally. Yet he gives no sign that this put any damper on his elation, either at the time or indeed in retrospect.”

Soros has called 1944 “the best year of my life.”

In the introduction to his father’s book, Soros said

“It is a sacreligious thing to say, but these ten months [of the Nazi occupation] were the happiest times of my life… We led an adventurous life and we had fun together.”

Yes he did say that.

From the American Thinker:

“Soros made his first billion in 1992 by shorting the British pound with leveraged billions in financial bets, and became known as the man who broke the Bank of England. He broke it on the backs of hard-working British citizens who immediately saw their homes severely devalued and their life savings cut drastically…almost overnight.”

And

When asked about his sphere of influence in the Soviets’ demise for a New Republic interview in 1994, Mr. Soros humbly replied that the author ought to report that “the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire.”

Soros wants to pop “the bubble of American supremacy.”

Soros says he “carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble.”

Soros’ goal is “to become the conscience of the world.”

In an interview in The Australian in 2009, Soros had this to say:

So do you have a sense that things are coming together for you now?

It is in a way a culminating point of my life’s work, so to speak. Everything is coming together. Yeah, the American election, the financial crisis, the theory of reflexivity. So it is actually a very stimulating period.

(emphases mine)

The recession, the pain of this country, the dire circumstances so many in this country find themselves in- it’s “stimulating” to Soros. It’s the culmination of his life’s work.

George Soros is a sociopath.

As Skookum noted, Soros ploughed $1 million into Media Matters to fight Fox News.

Soros has basically bought off NPR:

The left loves to go wild claiming that Ruppert Murdock, a famous conservative, owns a few news outlets. The left is also aghast that well-known righty Roger Ailes guides Fox News. Ailes’s ideology makes of his network a compromised product, they claim. It’s all a travesty of “news,” and “proof” that those agencies are contaminated by right-wing ideology say lefty detractors. So, with the news that George Soros is buying one hundred political “reporters” for National Public Radio (NPR), one waits with bated breath for the left to decry the fact that a famous anti-American leftist is buying and influencing the “news.”

Soros’ investment has brought results. In an example of brazen hypocrisy NPR has fired Juan Williams because Williams appeared on Fox News, and O’Reilly’s show in particular.

Soros has set about to attack the Tea Party.

It should be no surprise that multi-billionaire and globalist George Soros, born György Schwartz, known as “the man who broke the Bank of England,” has launched a new front to attack and discredit the Tea Parties on with his new website TeaPartyTracker.org. Soros is a staunch opponent to the Tea Party and their ideals of constitutionally limited government by the people.

Soros has his fingers in an astonishing number of left-wing and anti-American organizations including Media Matters, the Tides Foundation, the Center for American Progress and the Open Society Institute.

Soros most definitely intends to take control of the United States. Part of that effort is to control the Courts:

For a lesson in courtroom politics, have a look at Nevada, where a first salvo in a nationwide campaign to end state judicial elections will greet voters on the November ballot. According to the measure, the state would switch to the so-called Missouri plan for choosing judges—putting the responsibility for courts in the hands of a legal elite, instead of with voters or elected representatives.

Used by more than 30 states, the Missouri plan lets a judicial nominating commission select a limited slate of judicial candidates (usually two or three) from whom the Governor may choose. Though created in the name of protecting judges from political influence, it hasn’t worked out that way. States using this so-called merit selection method have had their judicial selections manipulated by lawyers and bar associations that nominate guild favorites. In most cases this has pushed courts to the activist left.

That’s a nifty outcome for liberal groups who see the state courts as the next frontier for moving political agendas. The Nevada initiative is part of a nationwide effort supported by George Soros, among others, to eliminate judicial elections in state courts. Through groups such as Justice at Stake, Mr. Soros’s Open Society Institute has spent some $45 million on the cause nationwide, according to numbers tracked by the American Justice Partnership. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has emerged as an unofficial spokesman for the effort, but the big money is coming from the political left. Nevada is viewed as a test drive.

Another prong in the Soros pitchfork is aimed at taking control of the Secretaries of the States.

History’s most notorious Georgian-turned-Russian, the politically astute Joseph Stalin once remarked, “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

The lesson has not been lost on the increasingly notorious Hungarian-cum-American George Soros.

A group backed by Soros is gearing up to steal the 2012 election for President Obama and congressional Democrats by installing left-wing Democrats as secretaries of state across the nation. From such posts, secretaries of state can help tilt the electoral playing field.

From the SOS PRoject website:

We are proud of our 2006 victory in Minnesota, where long time reformer Mark Ritchie pulled off a major upset with our support. He was later under fierce media and legal scrutiny as he oversaw the recount of the Franken/Coleman senatorial race. Ritchie operated with transparency and integrity, such that the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously ruled to uphold the extremely close election results, finally sending Franken to the Senate where his vote has been much needed.

“Transparency and integrity”

Laughable, to say the least.

Let’s put this in perspective:

This is, of course, the same Soros, the same hyperpolitical left-wing philanthropist who makes no secret of his intention to destroy capitalism. In an interview with Der Spiegel last year, Soros said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful — but also very harmful to our society.”

And Soros’ SOS Project have produced results:

More significant than outrageous statements being made are the actions being taken.

As the Wall Street Journal noted the “corrections” being made favor Al Franken in such a way that raises suspicions about the integrity of the process being overseen by Ritchie. The Powerline blog has had a running commentary on one suspicious action after another which give the correction process a very blue tinge. Among the “irregularities” are:

- misplaced” ballots turning up in an official’s trunk;

- “errors” in reporting vote totals almost entirely for the Senate race and no others;

- many of the new numbers coming out of three small precincts;

- and so on.

That election was most curious.

A review of Minnesota’s statewide database of registered voters revealed at least 2,812 deceased individuals voted in last November’s general election, according to a new report by the “traditional values” advocacy group Minnesota Majority.

And the dead weren’t the only problem:

The six-month election recount that turned former “Saturday Night Live” comedian Al Franken into a U.S. senator may have been decided by convicted felons who voted illegally in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

That’s the finding of an 18-month study conducted by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, which found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.

Franken won by 312 votes.

Soros also had a hand in something even bigger- magical even.

Enter George Soros Stage Left

Early in the summer of 2004, following Obama’s fortuitous primary victory, he got noticed by a mighty hefty Democrat donor, George Soros.

An article, written by Robert Bluey, of CNSNews.com, entitled: “Unlike Kerry, Obama Covets George Soros’ Support,” included this:

“Shortly after Soros equated the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Obama joined him for a New York fund-raiser June 7.

“The event, held at Soros’ home, boosted Obama’s campaign at a time he was still facing a challenge from Republican Jack Ryan.”

And again, Soros’ investment is paying off:

President Obama is adept at rewarding those who put him into office. And hard-left financier George Soros is emerging as a leader of the patronage pack.

A payback to Soros was due. As the chief moneyman behind left-wing political action committees like MoveOn.org, Soros, an early supporter of Obama, played an instrumental role in drumming up voter mobilization and political advertising on the novice candidate’s behalf. In no small part, Obama’s triumph in the Democratic primary over better-known rivals was a testament to Soros’s deep pockets and his political commitment.

Now it’s time for Soros to collect on his investment. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Obama administration has committed up to $10 billion to Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance oil exploration off of Brazil’s coast.

Barack Obama has some strong competition for the title of “The Greatest Threat to America.”

WOW! Great idea: spend your entire life posturing to run for President, then spend your Senate career being a professional Presidential candidate instead of a senator, and when you finally get the job…

THEN READ UP ON IT

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that Senator Obama is finally getting national security briefings, reading up on the dangers in the world by reading 4yr old books about 20yr old subjects. I’m really thrilled. I’d of course prefer he read MY BOOKS, but maybe he’ll get around to it. More than anything, I really would have loved-I MEAN LOVED(!!!!) to have been a fly on the wall at the first NatSec briefing of his cabinet appointees. Oh MAN that had to be a conundrum!

“We have to leave Iraq 18 months from now per the campaign pledge, but the DoD says they can’t do it logistically. Hillary Clinton at State says it’d ’cause chaos and force a third invasion of Iraq (OUCH, tough sell to the DNC base!). Intel guys are saying that 1) AQ was in Iraq before the invasion, 2) AQ chose to make Iraq the central front in the gwot (not Bush), 3) AQ is being decimated by Bush’s Surge so leaving now let’s AQ revive in an oil-rich/money rich country. They also tell me that Iran’s gonna be making 40+nukes a month starting in January, India is moving troops to border w Pakistan & both sides are on their bi-annual brink-of-nuclear-war escapade. Oh, and despite the speech in Germany…ain’t nobody in the world gonna stop the anarchy in Africa or SE Asia.”

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE!

Suggestion: Appoint Dennis Kucinich to form a Dept of Peace and abolish the DoD. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Poor Obama. He honestly had no clue & actually believed the leftist rhetoric. He followed Kos and Huffpo instead of the Milblogs and Flopping Aces. If he HAD been reading FA, then he wouldn’t need to be such a “voracious” reader of dated books. I’m only shocked he’s not skipping to the Cliff’s Notes.

There was an interesting article out in the NYP that goes back and looks at how Osama Bin Laden escaped Tora Bora in 2001. Most of the article rehashes the fact that the US relied on its allies in Afghanistan to block his escape, and the US relied on its ally Pakistan to block his escape, but now we get an interesting little accusation about how OTHER allies, NATO, allowed Bin Laden to escape.

One, the US unwisely trusted Pakistan to patrol its border. Two, NATO allies objected to the use of “GATOR” mines, which are dropped from planes and could have sealed up the Tora Bora area. But mostly, Fury says the decision to let Afghan allies form “the tip of the spear” was the biggest mistake. “The idea worked like a charm when we faced a common foe, the oppressive Taliban . . . but they were fighting Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden . . . we might as well have been asking for them to fight the Almighty Prophet Mohammed himself.”

In all my reading, research, conversations, etc., I have never heard about NATO blocking the use of GATOR mines. That would have been a great way to prevent Osama Bin Laden’s escape, but America’s allies let them down at every turn in 2001. I believe it, but I doubt we’ll hear Obama talk about how relying on allies isn’t as useful as it was 60yrs ago.

Similarly, I doubt that we’ll see anyone on the political left recognize that Germany and France are looking to pull out of Afghanistan rather than send more troops and do more fighting as the Obama campaign expects (according to Sen Obama, he’ll encourage them to do this by offering more foreign aid, but in the VP debate Sen Biden admitted that the very first thing a President Obama will do is CUT foreign aid.)

Amy Proctor points out another rod by which to measure it:

How do you know things are going really well in Iraq? The State Department doesn’t have to threaten to draft employees to fill positions in Iraq anymore. All 300 jobs are now filled with willing volunteers.

Recall how in Kenneth Timmerman’s The Shadow Warriors, the author describes how State Department officials, as well a some in the CIA and political appointees held over from the Clinton Administration, have worked to undermine the Bush Administration out of political partisanship over professionalism and patriotism.

FP: Shed some light for us on the shadow warriors at the State Department. How much have they hurt Bush administration policies?

Timmerman: Let me answer with an anecdote I describe in the book. After President Bush was elected to a second term in November 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell called a town meeting at the State Department in Washington . Faced with a sea of Kerry-Edwards stickers in the parking lot, Powell decided to confront the problem head on. “We live in a democracy,” he said. “As Americans, we have to respect the results of elections.” He went on to tell his employees that President Bush had received the most votes of any president in U.S. history, and that they were constitutionally obligated to serve him.

One of Powell’s subordinates, an assistant secretary of state, became increasingly agitated. Once Powell had dismissed everyone, she returned to her office suite, shut the door, and held a mini town meeting of her own. After indignantly recounting Powell’s remarks, she commented: “Well, Senator Kerry receive the second highest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history. If just one state had gone differently, Sen. Kerry would be President Kerry today.” Her staff owed no allegiance to the president of the United States , especially not to policies they knew were wrong, she said. If it was legal, and it would slow down the Bush juggernaut, they should do it, she told them.

Here was an open call to insubordination, and, I might add, it was not an isolated incident.

When Charlie Gibson interviewed Sarah Palin he did his absolute dead level best to pin her to the wall by using her comments about God and prayer against her.

This video puts her comments into perspective with a little bit of historical review.

I wrote about Douglas Feith’s 60 Minutes interview when it aired.

Wednesday, Feith enjoyed a 3 hour interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show (Pt1, 2, 3. Transcript here).

Friday, I bought the book from Borders bookstore in Westwood. Check out the website for the book. There are important documents to peruse through, there.

Douglas Feith’s website (check out the documents and myths vs. facts pages).

Also blogging:
American Power
Hugh Hewitt

The WaPo writes a dismissive article today on the new book written by Douglas Feith:

In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.

Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush’s policies.

Among the disclosures made by Feith in “War and Decision,” scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush’s declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that “war is inevitable.” The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a “momentous comment.”

Although he acknowledges “serious errors” in intelligence, policy and operational plans surrounding the invasion, Feith blames them on others outside the Pentagon and notes that “even the best planning” cannot avoid all problems in wartime. While he says the decision to invade was correct, he judges that the task of creating a viable and stable Iraqi government was poorly executed and remains “grimly incomplete.”

A majority of the blame, Feith writes, can be laid at the feet of Bremer and the State Department/CIA which jives completely with Kenneth Timmerman’s book Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender. One example is the Chalabi issue. In one segment Timmerman writes about a May 2004 meeting between the President and his principal advisors where Ambassador Robert Blackwill made a plea to sideline Ahmad Chalabi, who at the time was a member of the Governing Council and was being talked about to be a candidate for PM.

Blackwill argued that Chalabi was on the take and then through out a charge that he was meeting with Iranians in Kurdistan.

While Cheney had been critical of the CIA for leaking derogatory information on Chalabi to the press, he agreed that the information on these latest alleged meetings between Chalabi’s people and the Iranians was troubling. But so was the meeting hosted by the Brits ten days earlier in Basra with a top Iranian Foreign Ministry official, to which Bremer sent his foreign affairs advisor, State Department diplomat Ron Neumann. Certainly no decision was made by this group to talk directly to the Iranians, he pointed out. Did that make Jerry Bremer an Iranian agent?

Undaunted, Blackwill urged the principals as a precauction to terminate the intelligence-collection program with the Iraqi National Congress (a Chalabi organization). Even though DIA director Admiral Lowell Jacoby wanted to continue the program and U.S. Field commanders had testified publicly that INC information had saved the lives of U.S. soldiers, the CIA was trying to place the blame on the INC for its own mistakes in analysing Saddam’s WMD programs. “The CIA was pissed with us because we kept coming up with stuff they didn’t have,” said Chalabi aide Zaab Sethna.

Chalabi later alleged in U.S. court filings that King Abdullah II of Jordan “traveled to the United States and personally delivered to President George Bush a file containing the false accusation that Chalabi had informed the Iranian government that the United States had broken its encryption code and thus could intercept its secret communications.”

Timmerman writes about the fact that, at the time, Bremer was the sole person who named Iraqi judges and those judges reported to him. On May 20, 2004, one of those judges issued a arrest warrant for Chalabi and his house and office was raided. He even authorized the use of coalition forces to help out on the raid.

The raid turned up nothing of value. Instead they took

“a family Koran, a set of prayer beads, and documents relating to the INC’s investigation of the UN oil-for-food scandal. (The INC was instrumental in exposing the massive bribery scheme, and had compiled documents seized in former government ministries that identified hundreds of United Nations and foreign government officials who had taken kickbacks from Saddam Hussein.)

Back in Washington, former Pentagon official Michael Rubin was livid. “This is a huge blow to America’s prestige. The message we’ve just sent is that we do not stand by our allies, that the United States can’t be trusted. We’ve just told Arab liberals and democrats that it’s just plain crazy to work with America.”

Rubin, who had recently returned from a job with the CPA, spoke by phone with Sunni clerics, Shiite professionals, and independent Kurdish businessmen in Iraq in the hours immediately after the Baghdad raid. “Everyone in Iraq believes that because of U.S. actions, we are now heading for civil war,” he said. “We have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Basically, Bremer had gone mad,” he told me.

Bremer and the CPA later claimed they had seized counterfeit Iraqi money. Only problem was that they seized “several specimen counterfeit bills, stamped “COUNTERFEIT” in large letters by the Iraqi Central Bank.”

Timmerman writes about the “leaks” by senior U.S. officials to the MSM which alleged dozens of nefarious deeds by Chalabi.

To anyone who didn’t know Chalabi and hadn’t experienced the deep, personal animosity the CIA continued to harbor toward him, the allegations were stunning.

Time reported that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation into Chalabi’s relationship with the Iranians. Newsweek added that the gumshoes were seeking to determine “who in the U.S. government might have leaked such information to Chalabi or the INC.” News of the FBI involvement, and the opening of a U.S. based investigation, amounted to two additional leaks of highly sensitive classified information. All came from “senior” administration officials and were prima facie violations of the Espionage Act.

As the days wore on the alleged misdeeds by Chalabi grew more and more incredible, including a story that Chalabi had learned about the US breaking the Iranian code from a drunk soldier and then he passed it on to the Iranians. The Iranian station chief then sent word of this news back to Tehran, USING THE BROKEN CODE!

It was so ridiculous that no serious person could possible fall for it, said Michael Ledeen, a prominent neo-con author and longtime Chalabi supporter. “Basically it assumes, A, that Chalabi is an idiot. And, B, that the Iranian station chief in Baghdad is an idiot. And the one thing we know for sure in all of this is that the Iranian intelligence service is very good, and they don’t have idiots as station chiefs in places like Baghdad.”

Ledeen was right. The story was laughably absurd. Although the Chalabi “scandal” was front-page news all across America, the president managed to put enough distance between himself and Chalabi that his misfortunes did not translate into a significant loss of public confidence in the president or in the war.

But it was just the beginning. The shadow warriors were playing for keeps.

It appears Feith’s new book will go into the shadow warriors a bit along with others inside the administration who put roadblocks in the way of Iraqi success. But to come to this conclusion you have to wade through the dismissive tone of this WaPo piece written by Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung.

In his book, Feith defends the intelligence activities on grounds that the CIA was “politicizing” intelligence by ignoring evidence in its own reports of ties between Hussein and international terrorists.

Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, are described as repeatedly working behind the scenes to undercut sound proposals by Feith and other Pentagon officials and to undermine decisions Bush had made. Feith criticizes Powell’s failure to persuade France and Germany to support U.S. war policy at the United Nations, and to gain Turkey’s approval for U.S. troop movements in its territory, as failures of effort and commitment. Feith also asks what would have happened if Powell had argued with Bush against overthrowing Hussein. Powell might have persuaded the president, Feith writes, or, if not, could have resigned.

In an introduction to the manuscript, Feith writes that he has tried to avoid polemic and seeks only to contribute to the historical record. He argues, as have other Iraq hawks such as Richard Perle — a former Reagan administration Pentagon official and outside Rumsfeld adviser — that the administration’s careful approach to Iraq, including a swift transition to Iraqi control, was prevented from succeeding by ill-informed or disloyal subordinates.

The idea to which Feith appears most attached, and to which he repeatedly returns in the book, is the formation of an Iraqi Interim Authority. Feith’s office drew up a plan for the body — to be made up of U.S.-appointed Iraqis who would share some decision-making with U.S. occupation forces — in the months before the invasion. But while he says that Bush approved it, he charges that Bremer refused to implement it.

The key mistake that the United States made in Iraq, Feith asserts, was “the mishandling of the political transition.” The good that Bremer did, he concludes, “was outweighed by the harm caused by the fact of occupation.”

Others have criticized Feith’s plan as relying too heavily on Iraqi exile politicians, including Ahmed Chalabi. Feith says that he considered Chalabi one of the most astute and democratically minded Iraqis but that he had no special brief for him. Instead, he charges that the State Department, the CIA and the military’s Central Command were pathologically opposed to the exiles and to Chalabi in particular.

Feith continually denounces the CIA, accusing it of producing poor intelligence, intruding on the formulation of policy, and then using leaks to the media to defend itself and attack its bureaucratic opponents. Most notably, he charges that intelligence officials ignored and refused to investigate possible links between al-Qaeda and Hussein’s government.

In summarizing his view of what went wrong in Iraq, Feith writes that it was a mistake for the administration to rely so heavily on intelligence reports of Hussein’s alleged stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear weapons program, not only because they turned out to be wrong but also because secret information was not necessary to understand the threat Hussein posed.

Hussein’s history of aggression and disregard of U.N. resolutions, his past use of weapons of mass destruction and the fact that he was “a bloodthirsty megalomaniac” were enough, Feith maintains.

Couldn’t of said it better myself.

Continuing the story about the CIA officer who had found a possible underground nuclear site in Iraq:

The man running the site was an Iraqi general, identified in the Company X report as PEAIR/13. According to the Eastern Europeans who had worked with him, he was “not young, but looked younger then he was.” He wore a military uniform “with no indication of rank on it; he was also a senior member of the Baath party who often traveled by helicopter.” Later the Eastern European project manager identified him as “Saddam’s cousin.”

By early June 2004, they were ready to make a foray to the area. Traveling with LYHUNT/101, they drove in through Turkey to Mosul, where they were met by another Company X associate, a number of Iraqi shooters from Baghdad, and a contingent of Kurdish peshmergas. By now, security had become an issue throughout Iraq.

The first surprise when they reached the site was the chemical plant in the valley on the far side of the Jebel Makhoul. It didn’t fit with the description of the facilities they had heard from other engineers who had worked in the area in the 1980s, until they realized it had been built later. After the 2003 war, it had been looted right down to the rebar.

When they reached the hillside overlooking the Tigris, they found what appeared to be a large cistern. “It had some interesting features,” the former CIA officer said. “It was fed by a 24-inch pipe that drew water from five miles up the river.”

They thought the cistern might be camouflaging the entry to the underground site, but they had no excavation equipment to test their hypothesis. It was serviced by a double-paved macadam road – the only paved road in the area – thick enough to accommodate 20-ton trucks. Nearby they found a Soviet-designed power station large enough to provide power to a town of 30,000 people, although there was no town of that size nearby. But uranium enrichment required huge amounts of power, and large supplies of fresh water as coolant, to disguise the plant from heat-sensing satellites. The power station had also been looted.

That was when they saw the spoils from digging. “They weren’t piled, but spread over a very wide area, so satellites wouldn’t pick up signs of excavation,” the former CIA officer said. They later estimated the Vietnamese had hauled up the equivalent of 5,000 truckloads of dirt and ground rock from below the surface. Whatever they had built, it was enormous.

After that unsuccessful attempt to find the entry shaft to the underground site, the former operations officer reported his findings to U.S. military intelligence and to a top ranking officer at CIA. The CIA was “not responsive,” he said. But the military intelligence officer jumped at the information – at first. He sent representatives to debrief one of the former Eastern European engineers, but then let it drop. When asked, he said he had “no command authority” to pursue the investigation.

The former operations officer had a long-established relationship with Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin, a legendary figure in the special operations community who was now deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Boykin also jumped at the information at first, and gave the order to send in a SEAL team specialized in WMD sites to hunt for the hidden access shaft. “Then we got a call from Jacoby” – that would be Admiral Jacoby, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “He said, ‘Don’t go to Baghdad, it’s too dangerous.’”

This was the same Jacoby who, other Pentagon sources told me, “was too busy working on his third star” through politicking in Washington to take an active interest in what was going on in Iraq.

Finding the entry shaft to a suspected WMD site hidden in a ten square mile area that was covered with rubble and ruined buildings was no mean feat. It was going to require significant excavation work. But before that, they had to narrow down the area to search, and the DIA made it clear they were not going to help.

Not long after this, a left-wing think tank, the Center for Public Integrity, released an “investigation” alleging that the wife of a top Company X executive involved in tracking down Site 555 had improperly used her position as a deputy assistant secretary of defense to steer Iraq reconstruction contracts his way. “She stayed clear of this,” the former operations officer said, referring to their investigation and other operations in Iraq. “This was just a smear aimed at sabotaging our efforts.”

Returning to Baghdad on his own dime in September 2004, the former operations officer decided to brief U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, whom he had known from Iran-Contra day in Honduras. “His people said we were full of shit,” he told me. “But remember, this was when the ISG was coming out with their final report. They wanted no waves, no loose ends.”

The Iraq Survey Group “inspectors” rarely left their compound near the Baghdad international airport because of the danger of IEDs and insurgent attacks. Their rare sorties mainly involved trips to the airport stockade, where top officials from Saddam’s regime were being held. “The big shots knew about the program, but they didn’t know the details,” the former operations officer said. Details such as the precise grid coordinates of the underground facility beneath Site 555.

The more Hoekstra learned about Site 555, the angrier he got. He had encouraged the former operations officer to return to Iraq several times in 2005, and again in 2006. By now, they had narrowed down the area to search for the hidden entry tunnel, and believed they had located what appeared to be ventilation shafts for the underground production halls. But still the DIA refused to help.

Hoekstra pounded on the table, and sent House intelligence committee staff members repeatedly to DIA headquarters. He wanted them to send in a team with handheld underground anomaly detectors, but the DIA refused. So did General Boykin’s boss, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone.

Finally, Hoekstra went to the White House and met with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, and suggested that he request a copy of the Company X report from General Boykin’s office at the Pentagon. Boykin eventually sent it over – minus the pictures, site diagrams, and key pages. What you guys are doing is history, one of Boykin’s aides said. We’re not interested in history.

Didn’t anybody get it? If they could locate an underground nuclear weapons site that had eluded the UN investigators and where uranium enrichment work had continued undetected for years, it would provide dramatic proof that Saddam Hussein had never abandoned his WMD programs, as the CIA, the Democrats, and the United Nations claimed.

Sometimes Hoekstra felt he was the only one who cared any longer to learn the truth about Saddam’s weapons programs.

To this day there had never been a concerted effort to follow up on this underground facility. Even to find out if it exists at all. Why not? If it exists it can be added to many other examples of evidence found that indicate Saddam was most assuredly in possession of WMD and had aspirations for the big one, nuclear.

• UN Inspectors found 11 empty chemical warheads in excellent condition prior to the invasion. They were illegal and supposed to be destroyed.
• Marines Reported two missiles tipped with sarin and mustard, and fourteen barrels of chemical agent. I already cited USA Today but…
• a cache of BM-21 missiles loaded with sarin were found and ready to fire.
• Polish troops find 17 shells of sarin and mustard gas
• 500 tons of uranium(enough for 142 bombs) found at an Iraqi nuclear facility. 1.8 tons were enriched, they found centrifuges (for enrichment) at the site, all was illegal.
• two separate attacks with ieds show one was filled with sarin, the other mustard. Both shells were tied to a cache Saddam supposedly destroyed.
• Dozens of soldiers, a CNN cameraman, a Knight Ridder reporter, and two Iraqi pow’s were all treated for exposure to nerve agents after finding a mobile labratory containing several chemical weapons including sarin, tabun and lewisite.
• we learn that 500 sarin and mustard gas shells were discovered in Iraq. They are not new, but very deadly and useful as wmds according to the US Report on the weapons.
• The fourth Infantry found a stockpile of .55 gal drums of cyclosarin…a nerve agent. Nearby were missiles, lab and chemical gear.
• It’s reported the Saddam government contacts Finnish government with regard to anthrax decontamination. Why would they need to know about anthrax decontamination? We certainly weren’t going to be using bioweapons.

An interesting segment of the great book Shadow Warriors is about the discoveries of Company X in Iraq regarding the “missing” WMD in Iraq. I’m gonna split this up into two parts seeing as how it is quite long but well worth the time to read:

The most intriguing evidence of hidden Iraqi WMD stockpiles, however, did not come from any of these sources. It came from a source that Hoekstra had developed all on his own: a former top CIA operations officer, who had returned to Iraq after the war and stumbled onto information pointing to a vast and previously unknown site, buried deep beneath a hillside north of Baghdad, where former Iraqi officials alleged Saddam had pursued nuclear weapons wrok in the utmost secrecy.

After a business trip to Iraq in February 2004, the former operations officer was contacted by an engineer, working for a company in a former Eastern European country, who had worked on infrastructure projects under Saddam. The engineer and his company were hoping to win new contracts in Iraq, and had also traveled to Baghdad. On their way back to Turkey, on of the Eastern Europeans pointed to a hilltop east of the Baghdad-Mosul highway, on the far side of the Jebel Makhoul, along the Tigris. He had always been told that the hilltop disguised an underground weapons plant, he said.

Some of the engineers traveling with them offered that they had worked on a nearby infrastructure project. As they got to talking, they mentioned that they had always whispered among themselves that the underground site housed a secret centrifuge uranium-enrichment plant.

When he first heard this story, the former operations officer felt it had the ring of authenticity. “These guys had been there for thirteen or fourteen years,” he told me. “They would get drunk with the Iraqis and learn things about the WMD programs they were not supposed to know.”

Along with a business partner, he began tracking down the Eastern European engineers who had worked in Iraq and interviewing them. “We found five or six independent sources who all noted that they had seen eighteen-wheel trucks pass through an entrance into the hill area we were looking at,” the former operations officer said. What the trucks did once they entered the hillside, nobody knew. The entire area was a military zone, ringed with several rows of barbed wire.

In his reports to Hoekstra, the former operations officer referred to himself and his partners as “Company X of McLean, Virginia” (where the CIA is located), and encrypted the names of sources in CIA-style diagraphs. He and his associates interviewed thirty-one engineers and workers from a former Soviet-block country who had never been debriefed by any U.S. or UN agency before. One of the engineers, identified as LYHUNT/103, had been in Iraq from September 1984 until April 1994 “with a short interruption for the Gulf War.” He returned to Iraq several times a year after that until 2000.

LYHUNT/103 and his colleagues worked directly with TECO, the Technical Corps for Special Projects, project manager for “Iraq’s highest priority weapons projects.” TECO was headquarted with the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, and “reported directly to Saddam’s household,” the former operations officer said. Among TECO’s responsibilities were Iraq’s clandestine nuclear weapons, its long-range ballistic missile programs, and the Super Gun that was being built by the former American ballistics genius Gerald Bull. LYHUNT/103 and other colleagues agreed to talk to the former CIA operations officer on condition that they not be identified in any way. They were well aware that their activities in Iraq after 1991 were in violation of international sanctions, U.S. law, and the laws of their own country. They risked serious jail time if they were identified. But they said they were willing to share their knowledge, because they now understood the full import of the highly compartmented project where they had worked, and it scared them. They referred to it as Site 555.

Site 555, also known as the al-Fajr facility, was “intended to be an electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS) uranium-enrichment facility,” the former CIA operative told Hoekstra. Bombed and partially destroyed during the Gulf War, it was leveled in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 687 in 1991. According to Iraq’s declarations to the UN, the al-Fajr facility was a “duplicate” of an EMIS plant in Tarmiya, but uranium-enrichment equipment was never installed. Once the buildings were leveled, the site was no longer inspected.

But there was much more at the site then the UN inspectors ever saw, the Eastern European engineers said. Hidden beneath a nearby hill was an underground structure about 600 meters deep not related to any mineral quarry. Another East European source, LYHUNT/101, commented that it would have taken only minimal effort to level the entry to the shaft and cover it with sand, leaving the deep underground installations hidden, the former CIA operative told Hoekstra.

In April 2004, the Eastern European engineers drove together down from Mosul to Baghdad, and LYHUNT/103 pointed to a series of low hills beyond the road. “That’s where the shaft is,” he said. But upon further questioning, the former agency officer realized that neither LYHUNT/103 or his colleagues had ever seen the actual opening or visited the underground site itself. They had worked on a water purification plant and other engineering works on the surface.

Bit by bit, as Company X debriefed more of the Eastern Europeans who had worked in the area, they got a better idea of where to look for the underground site.

“The debriefings indicated that the underground facilities had been dug by 2,500 Vietnamese laborers during the mid-1980s, who toiled for $4 per month,” the former CIA officer said. “They dug at night to avoid infrared signatures. It was done by drill and blast, without heavy machinery.” To the trained eye, these were all telltale signs of Iraq’s intent to camouflage the work from satellite surveillance.

The former operative informed Hoekstra of information he had learned from another of the East European engineers:

Per LYHUNT/105′s knowledge and his recollection of documentation that had been available to him, the factories at Site 555 were installations for the enrichment of uranium and nuclear chemistry, with one production building having a large internal movable horizontal crane for some kind of assembly, and a single airstrip runway at the bottom of the hill near the cave. The cave represented the entry to a major underground structure, with horizontal elements (tunnels or pathways), but LYHUNT/105 did not know how many tunnels or how deep the structure was. The location of the entry to the underground structure was by the end of the airstrip towards the bottom of the hill.

What was found and what was done with it in Part 2 here.