Colonel W. Patrick Lang delivers the best assessment of the Pentagon’s self-assessment:

It now seems that the people who twisted and twisted the available information until they could produce fabricated untruths to “feed” the American people are still protected and will “get away with it.”

Douglas Feith has been variously described as the “dumbest” this or the dumbest that. Dumb? How? He “got away with it” and now the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) employ him at Georgetown University in teaching the young how to be public servants at the School of Foreign Service. How can that be?

I wrote the article “Drinking the Koolaid” in 2004. In it, I described how this man and his friends distorted the truth in such a way as to deceive the American people and draw them into war. Feith’s neocon comrades ridiculed the article at the time. It would seem that their criticism was “inappropriate but not illegal,” nevertheless, they are clearly the winners in the public discussion of their infamy.

Cite of the author, as published in the Middle East Policy Council Journal.

From a May 6, 2003 op-ed by the NY Time’s columnist, Nicholas Kristof.

Douglas Feith is now gone from the Pentagon but his spirit marches on there. The “Iraq Project” is reborn with new goals. We now have the “Iran Project.” pl

Report of David S. Cloud and Mark Mazzetti of the NY Times

In adolescence, I was prone to make colossal blunders out of inexperience. And when called to account, my first instinct was to defend myself with the very reasonable “but how was I to know? I lacked the wisdom of years.”

Such excuses lose their reasonableness as our brainfruits ripen. When that’s advanced by the Pentagon, it cannot be called an ‘assessment’ at all. It is cover-thine-own-ass propaganda typifying all bureaucracies more concerned with self-perpetuation than with the national interest.

Whether it was illegal to twist the intelligence was never the question except for those twisters who had a mission of dishonesty to foist upon the public.

As the purpose of the Pentagon is to interpret the mission that elected policymakers define and determine how that mission can be carried out efficiently and successfully, the question has always been: did they prove efficient and/or successful?

They did not, after the initial invasion. And even in that initial invasion, they failed to secure weapons stockpiles that have contributed to the collective casualties in the occupation period where the greatest failures occurred.

That’s the yardstick the Pentagon must be measured with. Illegality only matters to the bureaucrats, like Feith, who chose to tiptoe at the edge of legality, more concerned with his ass than the millions he exposed, and the hundreds of thousands of dead asses he contributed to.

As citizens, weighing criminal culpability is the secondary consideration to the first - the defense of the nation’s interests. And that question should be applied to policymakers first, not to their enabling wankers and waterboys.

It’s absolutely not the role of the Pentagon to define that, lest we grant license for a military coup.

I’m convinced the ‘Answerer’ to the acts of the ‘Decider’ has to be Nancy Pelosi.

The first level of responsibility for defining whether the best interests of the nation have been met in the promotion of and conduct of the war rests in the other branches of government. And since the Executive Branch has tried to disable the power of the other two branches by claiming (a) that the President can both continue the war and escalate it, no matter what Congress decides, and (b) the President can utilize every means to corrupt the Judiciary, stacking the prosecution with sycophants when the Legislature resists court-stacking, it’s imperative that those branches respond while their dwindling powers remain.

Surrendering those ‘checks-and-balances’ powers to the president via the Patriot Act, via presidential signing statements, via the Military Commissions Act (granting preemptive pardons for potential war crimes) and via Senator Specter’s bill attachment (permitting the prosecutor replacements), to cite the most egregious examples, the legislative branch’s Republican majority has rubberstamped the branch into an historically unparallelled level of institutional impotency.

But the previous Democratic minority is not blameless, either. The acquiescence of seven of its members against the threat of the GOP mahority to utilize the nuclear option instead of carrying through on the threat to shutdown Senate business to maintain protection against the tyranny of the majority might be viewed more charitably in a different context.

Against the backdrop of a president actively engaged in encroaching on the powers of all the branches of government, and who, in effect, has aggressively sought to assume the powers of a monarchy, any compromise in permitting that deserves rebuke. We may already have lost the Judiciary’s objectivity.

However, the thinness of the current senate Democratic ‘majority’ (which is - other than for committee control - actually a tie), grants little leeway for the Democrats to reestablish the lines between the powers of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches to levels where historical precedence arguments can hold sway.

As a result, the principal question of whether the executive branch’s policymakers acted properly to advance the nation’s best interests cannot be decided by any branch of government where control of the partisan split holds sway over those more committed to that than to the nation’s interests.

Anyone looking for rational objective assessments and remedies to the principal question would be best advised to ignore the rationalizations of the Pentagon and the maneuverings of the evenly divided Senate. It’s equally difficult to retain strong confidence in the Judiciary, though, to date, they’ve been the only branch displaying any success in putting brakes on the monarchal ambitions of the current president.

Thus, the so-called ‘People’s House’ of Representatives presently provides us people the greatest chances for a restoration of health to the ‘checks-and-balances’ system our Constitutional founders desired and established. Any subsequent effort to get to the bottom of the principal question about whether the war was conducted in the best interests of the nation, and the successive questions about ethics and legality, must come first from ‘the People’s House.’

And that bastion against a return to a monarchal form of government can only be strengthened via the continuation of popular support for answers to these multiple questions. At the moment, with two-thirds of the country opposed to the president on the war, it’s important to recognize that the public confidence in Congress is nearly as weak.

The House of Representatives, with its clear Democratic majority, must act decisively on these questions. If it fails to do so, the erosion of public support for the federal government will certainly advance the probability of a Constitutional crisis and could snowball further, into a popular revolution.

Neither outcome - a monarchal Presidency nor a second American revolution - is a desirable result for any but extremists lacking any historical wisdom about the dangers both present.

As we head to another Presidential election where many activists and the larger public contend with the concept that it’s time to cross the gender barrier and have a woman as President, they risk overlooking the enormous power and responsibility that is currently thrust on one woman already.

Nancy Pelosi.

That she’s third in line for the presidency already is a secondary point. The first and most critical point is that her leadership of the House has the potential to stave off the extremist outcomes that will define ALL the interests of our country, good, bad or indifferent.

She, the House Democrats and the House Republicans capable of moderating their partisanship provide the best hope for the sustenance of or resumption of the nation’s best interests, and for the very survival of our nation as a representative democracy.

Should she succeed, I’d submit that no woman in the country would be better qualified to break the presidential gender barrier. Should she be unequal to that enormous burden, who gets elected as our next King or Queen will become a trivial pursuit by comparison.

In my eyes, the greatest threat our nation faces is not the threat of criminal organizations like Al Qaeda, nor of hostile nations like North Korea. Even a nuclear capacity released - as horrifying an event imaginable - can’t thwart the fight and might of our response to such an attack.

Our principal threat is the risk of losing our entire country to an overthrow from within - with or without the blessing of legality. I hope our House and its leadership proves capable while it retains its power to do so.

Then we can get better answers to all the questions. And better solutions.