On Sept. 11, 2001, after Bush returned to the White House, the president and his top advisors gathered to discuss how best to respond and retaliate. Richard Clarke, Bush’s top counterterrorism advisor, wanted to focus attention immediately towards Afghanistan, but faced some resistance.
As Clarke told 60 Minutes in March, Don Rumsfeld insisted, “There aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan.”
Unfortunately, Rumsfeld wasn’t the only one to bemoan this problem. But while the Defense secretary wanted to emphasize target-rich Iraq, it appears his under-secretary was looking to an even less-relevant target: South America.
Days after 9/11, a senior Pentagon official lamented the lack of good targets in Afghanistan and proposed instead U.S. military attacks in South America or Southeast Asia as “a surprise to the terrorists,” according to a footnote in the recent 9/11 Commission Report. The unsigned top-secret memo, which the panel’s report said appears to have been written by Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith, is one of several Pentagon documents uncovered by the commission which advance unorthodox ideas for the war on terror.
Launching attacks in South America after 9/11? Yeah, I think I’d describe this as an “unorthodox idea.”
The memo suggested “hitting targets outside the Middle East in the initial offensive” or a “non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq,” the panel’s report states. U.S. attacks in Latin America and Southeast Asia were portrayed as a way to catch the terrorists off guard when they were expecting an assault on Afghanistan.
The memo’s content, Newsweek has learned, was in part the product of ideas from a two-man secret Pentagon intelligence unit appointed by Feith after 9/11: veteran defense analyst Michael Maloof and Mideast expert David Wurmser, now a top foreign-policy aide to Dick Cheney.
How Feith continues to have a job may be the greatest mystery of the Bush administration. He is, after all, the one who pushed the White House to make WMD the principal rationale for the war in Iraq; it was his office that was in charge of Iraq’s military prisons (you know, the ones where innocent Iraqis were raped, tortured, and killed); it was Feith who encouraged the administration to abandon the Geneva Conventions; the scandalous Office of Special Plans was run by Feith; and it was Feith who was meeting regularly with Ahmed Chalabi, who as it turns out, was an Iranian spy.
I know I could ask the same question about dozens of Bush administration officials, but how on earth does this guy keep his high-ranking Pentagon job?