So it looks like it will be announced this afternoon that the Pentagon's inspector general will launch an investigation into the activities of one Douglas Feith. Feith, as we know, was the inside ringleader for the neoconservative cabal during the run-up to the war in Iraq. He created the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (CTEG) and the Office of Special Plans (OSP), the Orwellian-named successor to the CTEG. As I documented extensively here and here, Feith's Pentagon shop was the principal Lie Factory for bogus intelligence on Iraq's supposed ties to Al Qaeda and on Iraq's WMD programs.
Pentagon sources say that Acting Inspector General Tom Gimble will announce this afternoon the scope of the inquiry into Feith and Co. His action comes in response to two letters, one from Senator Carl Levin (D.-Mich.), sent on Sept. 22, and one from Senator Pat Roberts (R.-Kan.), sent Sept. 9. Roberts, of course, chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). GImble, who took over as Pentagon I.G. only in September, is the former Deputy Inspector General for Intelligence, who served as the Principal Advisor to the IG and the DoD on all matters relating to DoD-wide intelligence programs and operations, according to DOD. He's a civilian with no apparent ties to the cabal himself--so it's likely that he will apply the typical flinty-eyed look at Feith that we usually associate with an I.G.'s work.
This comes in the context of the Bush administration's continuing free-fall on Iraq. Bit by bit, Congress is turning against him, and the SSCI will conduct its own Phase II inquiry into pre-war intelligence manipulation by the Bush people--an inquiry that can't help but look into the Feith-based intelligence system. Bush is scrambling around Asia sounding like Richard I-am-not-a-crook Nixon, saying, "I didn't lie! I didn't lie!" In my humble opinion, as I've told all my friends, Bush in fact didn't lie, simply because he is Too Stupid To Lie. He just read the scripts handed to him by the VP and by Feith. After all, this is the president who said, in June 2003, "We found the WMD." No doubt he will be as surprised as anyone when he finds out that Dick and Dougie made all that stuff up.