Douglas Feith is BuzzFlash.com's GOP Hypocrite of the Week

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April 4, 2008 | SEND TO A FRIEND | GET EARLY NOTICE OF THE HOTW

Douglas Feith

Welcome back to the Buzzflash GOP Hypocrite of the Week.

Douglas Feith was a key player behind the scenes, a top Neocon theorist and activist who ran Rumsfeld's pre-Iraq War misinformation (Office of Special Plans) campaign out of the Pentagon, officially as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

In reality, he was feeding out lies to help enable Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell to launch the Iraq War.

In addition, Feith played a key role in the behind-the-scenes administration position that any fighter captured in the Middle East was basically a non-combatant and not subject to the Geneva Accords, meaning that they could be tortured or even killed under torture (as was the case at Abu Ghraib). Feith supported this position going back to the Reagan Administration.

Feith's arguments for unleashing torture by classifying "non-state" soldiers as not being "prisoners of war" was the basis for CIA, White House, and DOJ memos (including one just released) that formed the legal rationale for the horrors of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere.

Most recently, Feith, now a professor at Georgetown University, boasted to a writer for Vanity Fair about his year of living torturously:

"This year I was really a player," Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory. I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America's moral authority. He was not. "The problem with moral authority," he said, was "people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely."

"When history looks back, I want to be in the class of people who did the right thing, the sensible thing, and not necessarily the fashionable thing, the thing that met the aesthetic of the moment." That's what Feith told the New Yorker in 2005.

But Feith did the wrong thing. He demeaned himself by debasing the human condition and degrading the nobility and standards of the American nation.

He is a hypocrite who justifies his support of torture and murder as being righteous, when actually it is evil.

Feith is just another chickenhawk who endangered our own military personnel by encouraging the bypassing of the Geneva Convention and the American Constitution.

He deserves more than being named the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week. He merits jail time.

Remember our motto: So many Republican hypocrites, so little time.

Catch up with you soon.

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This is the first HOTW Award for Douglas Feith. Welcome to the Club.

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