Special Plans: The Blogs on Douglas Feith & the Faulty Intelligence That Led to War (Informed Citizen) (Paperback)

Pulls together informative and entertaining writing of the past five years to track the central role of Douglas Feith. -- David Terrenoire, author of Beneath a Panamanian Moon

Testament to the fact that the new Internet media delivers needed information the mainstream press no longer covers in detail. -- Mark Karlin, Editor & Publisher, BuzzFlash.com

Here’s a story of espionage, think tanks, power brokers, a drunk nameed "Curveball," and Douglas Feith, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy whose Office of Special Plans oversaw the enormous manipulations and failures of intelligence that led to the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq.

This is another entry into The Informed Citizen Series, which covers American issues with a voice that does not come from elected officials, the television and radio news networks, or the major print media. In this book, Allison Hantschel (Athenae of First-Draft.com) pulls together blog entries from some of the Internet's most relied-upon bloggers, including Jerome Doolittle, Josh Marshall, Matthew Yglesias, John Aravosis, and many others to fill in necessary details to a key part of the story of how and why the U.S. is in Iraq.

Here’s a story of espionage, think tanks, power brokers, and Douglas Feith, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy whose Office of Special Plans oversaw the enormous manipulations and failures of intelligence that led to the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq.

This is another entry into The Informed Citizen Series, which covers American issues with a voice that does not come from elected officials, the television and radio news networks, or the major print media. In this book, Allison Hantschel (Athenae of First-Draft.com) pulls together blog entries from some of the Internet's most relied-upon bloggers, including Jerome Doolittle, Josh Marshall, Matthew Yglesias, John Aravosis, and many others to fill in necessary details to a key part of the story of how and why the U.S. is in Iraq.

Allison Hantschel is a 10-year veteran of the newspaper business, having worked at two award-winning weeklies and three metropolitan daily newspapers. Her work has been published in The Chicago Sun-Times, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Madison Magazine, Wisconsin Trails, The Daily Southtown, The Elgin Courier-News, The Madison Times, The Isthmus and On Wisconsin magazine. Since August 2004 she has published the collaborative writing and politics blog First Draft, under the handle Athenae, along with partners Tena Hollingsworth, Holden Caulfield, and pie.

Douglas Feith is not a well-known person outside Washington, D.C. His erstwhile title, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, is not an exciting one, nor was his prior career--a series of think-tank posts, low-level Pentagon appointments and faithful if mundane service in Republican administrations--designed to earn him the sort of shooting-star reputation that preceded figures like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

Yet within the ranks of those who designed and prosecuted the invasion of Iraq, there is perhaps no more important functionary than Douglas Feith. Every lasting image of the two-year-old conflict bears his fingerprints.

A library in Baghdad burning, thousand-year-old copies of the Q’uran aflame.

A prisoner, naked and chained at the ankles, standing with arms outstretched before a grinning lieutenant, the soldier’s thumb pointed skyward for the camera.

A report, buried until after the November election, that said promised and feared weapons of mass destruction, nuclear missiles, chemical bombs, were nowhere in Biblical Babylon to be found.

From the shock-and-awe prologue to the scandal-plagued present, Feith and his fellow war planners meticulously created, with a series of small decisions and bright ideas, some very large disasters.