Douglas J. Feith

In 2009, Feith became one of several Bush Administration officials under consideration for investigation of possible war crimes in a Spanish court, headed by Baltasar Garzón under claims of universal jurisdiction. The case had reportedly still been active as of 2011.

In 2008, Feith became a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, where he is the director of its Center for National Security Strategies.

Feith was interviewed by the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes in a segment that was aired on April 6, 2008. During this interview he promoted his newly released memoir, War and Decision and defended the decision making that led to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

On April 8, 2008, Feith's memoir, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, was published by HarperCollins.

In February 2007, the Pentagon's inspector general issued a report that concluded that Feith's office "developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers." This repeated Feith's earlier involvement with Team B as a postgraduate, when alternative intelligence assessments exaggerating threats to the United States turned out to be wrong on nearly every point. The report found that these actions were "inappropriate" though not "illegal." Senator Carl Levin, Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, stated that "The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq. The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war." At Senator Levin's insistence, on April 6, 2007, the Pentagon's Inspector General's Report was declassified and released to the public.

Feith is an ardent supporter of Israel. Along with Richard Perle and David Wurmser, he was a member of the study group which authored a controversial report entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, a set of policy recommendations for the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The report was published by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies without an individual author being named. According to the report, Feith was one of the people who participated in roundtable discussions that produced ideas that the report reflects. Feith pointed out in a September 16, 2004 letter to the editor of The Washington Post that he was not the co-author and did not clear the report's final text. He wrote, "There is no warrant for attributing any particular idea [in the report], let alone all of them, to any one participant."

Feith was responsible for the de-Ba'athification policy promulgated in Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Order 1 which entered into force on 16 May 2003.

Upon leaving the Pentagon, Feith co-founded, with Marc Zell, the Washington, DC law firm of Feith & Zell. The firm engaged in lobbying efforts for, among others, the Turkish, Israeli and Bosnian governments, in addition to representing defense corporations Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Feith left the firm in 2001, following his nomination as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

Feith joined the administration of President George W. Bush as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in 2001. His appointment was facilitated by connections he had with other neoconservatives, including Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. With his new appointment in hand, Feith proved influential in having Richard Perle chosen as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Feith was criticized during the first term of the Bush administration for creating the Office of Strategic Influence. This office came into existence to support the War on Terror. The office's aim was to influence policymakers by submitting biased news stories into the foreign media. Feith played a significant role in the buildup to the Iraq War. Feith has been characterized as an architect of the Iraq War.

As part of his portfolio, he supervised the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, a group of policy and intelligence analysts created to provide senior government officials with raw intelligence, unvetted by the intelligence community. The office was responsible for hiring Lawrence Franklin, who was later convicted along with AIPAC employees Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman for passing classified national defense information to an Israeli diplomat Naor Gilon. The office, eventually dismantled, was later criticized in Congress and the media for analysis that was contradicted by CIA analysis and investigations performed following the invasion of Iraq. In response to the allegedly poor work of Feith's Office of Special Plans, General Tommy Franks, who led both the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq War called Feith "the dumbest fucking guy on the planet".

During his time in the Pentagon in the Reagan administration, Feith helped to convince the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz all to recommend against ratification of changes to the Geneva Conventions. The changes, known as the "Additional Protocols", grant armed non-state actors prisoner of war status under certain circumstances even if they fail to distinguish themselves from the civilian population to the same extent as members of the armed forces of a high contracting party. Reagan informed the United States Senate in 1987 that he would not ratify Additional Protocol I. At the time, both The Washington Post and The New York Times editorialized in favor of Reagan's decision to reject Additional Protocol I as a revision of humanitarian law that protected terrorists.

He transferred from the NSC staff to the Pentagon, in 1982, to work as special counsel for Richard Perle, who was then serving as assistant secretary to the United States Secretary of Defense. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger promoted Feith, in 1984, to deputy assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy and when Feith left the Pentagon, in 1986, Weinberger awarded him the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the department's highest civilian award.

At Harvard, Feith had studied under Richard Pipes, who joined the Reagan administration's National Security Council, in 1981, to help carry out a private intelligence project called Team B that Pipes and his students had conceived. Feith joined the NSC as a Middle East specialist that same year, working under Pipes.

Feith grew up in Elkins Park, part of Cheltenham Township, a Philadelphia suburb. He attended Philadelphia's Central High School, and later attended Harvard University, where he obtained his undergraduate degree and graduated magna cum laude in 1975. He continued on to the Georgetown University Law Center, receiving his J.D. magna cum laude in 1978. After graduation, he worked for three years as an attorney with the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP.

Feith worked on the staff of senator Henry M. Jackson in 1975 before going on to work on Elmo Zumwalt's campaign against segregationist senator Harry Byrd, Jr. Byrd, an independent since 1970, defeated Zumwalt, a Democrat, 57–38%.

Douglas Jay Feith (born July 16, 1953) served as the under secretary of Defense for Policy for United States president George W. Bush, from July 2001 until August 2005. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think-tank.