Hugh Hewitt, in an effort to defend the “fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth“, offers the following:

Let A Thousand Team Bs Bloom: Douglas Feith Deserves Our Thanks
There is No Category of “Inappropriate� Activities

[…]

Team B members, all approved by the CIA, included Harvard political scientist Richard Pipes; Gen. Daniel Graham, who had headed the Defense Intelligence Agency; Paul Nitze, a former deputy secretary of defense; Gen. John Vogt, the former Air Force chief of staff; Thomas Wolfe, a top Rand Corp. executive; Gen. Jasper Welsh, the head of the Air Force’s system analysis; and Paul Wolfowitz, who was at the Arms Control Agency.

The three topics selected by the National Security Council were:

* Soviet missile accuracy
* The ability of low-flying U.S. bombers to penetrate Soviet defenses
* Overall Soviet strategic capabilities and intentions

[…]

The same data produced two startlingly different results. On the issue of Soviet missile accuracy, for example, Team A concluded that Soviet missiles were relatively inaccurate (¼ of a nautical mile), and therefore did not pose a major threat to U.S. silos; whereas Team B concluded that Soviet missiles may have attained sufficient accuracy (1/15th of a nautical mile) to threaten these same silos. ( As Soviet missile testing later revealed. Team B turned out to be correct on this issue.)

The lesson of this extraordinary disputation was not that the Soviet Union had a greater or lesser capacity but that intelligence estimates, no matter how objective they may seem, are an inherently uncertain enterprise, based on questionable assumptions and selective exploitation of sources.

[…]

With this background we turn to the report of the interim inspector general of the Department of Defense who is not a fan of independent analysis of the intelligence community’s work product by the Department of Defense. The Defense Department undertook just such an analysis in 2002 when the Bush administration wanted to know whether or not Iraq was cooperating with al Qaeda.

“It’s healthy to criticize the CIA’s intelligence,” said former Pentagon policy chief Douglas Feith on “Fox News Sunday.” “What the people in the Pentagon were doing was right. It was good government.”

It was indeed “good government” to push for a Team B approach to the question of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda[.]

Good one, Hugh! Everyone should agree that propaganda, manufactured in an ideological meth-lab by retards raised on wingnut welfare, which turns out to not only be wholly inaccurate but disasterously so, is ‘good government’.

As was the original Team B:

There were three “B” teams. One studied Soviet low-altitude air defense capabilities, one examined Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) accuracy, and one investigated Soviet strategic policy and objectives. But it is the third team, chaired by Harvard professor Richard Pipes, that ultimately received considerable publicity and is commonly referred to as Team B.

The Team B experiment was concocted by conservative cold warriors determined to bury détente and the SALT process. Panel members were all hard-liners. The experiment was leaked to the press in an unsuccessful attempt at an “October surprise.” But most important, the Team B reports became the intellectual foundation of “the window of vulnerability” and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Reagan.

[…]

when Team B looked at “hard” data, everywhere it saw the worst case. It reported, for instance, that the Backfire bomber “probably will be produced in substantial numbers, with perhaps 500 aircraft off the line by early 1984.” (In fact, the Soviets had 235 in 1984.) Team B also regarded Soviet defenses with alarm. “Mobile ABM [anti-ballistic missiles] system components combined with the deployed SAM [surface-to-air missile] system could produce a significant ABM capability.” But that never occurred.

Team B found the Soviet Union immune from Murphy’s law. They examined ABM and directed energy research, and said, “Understanding that there are differing evaluations of the potentialities of laser and CPB [charged particle beam] for ABM, it is still clear that the Soviets have mounted ABM efforts in both areas of a magnitude that it is difficult to overestimate.” (Emphasis in original.)

But overestimate they did. A facility at the Soviet Union’s nuclear test range in Semipalatinsk was touted by Gen. George Keegan, Chief of Air Force Intelligence (and a Team B briefer), as a site for tests of Soviet nuclear-powered beam weapons. In fact, it was used to test nuclear-powered rocket engines. According to a Los Alamos physicist who recently toured Russian directed-energy facilities, “We had overestimated both their capability and their [technical] understanding.”

Team B’s failure to find a Soviet non-acoustic anti-submarine system was evidence that there could well be one. “The implication could be that the Soviets have, in fact, deployed some operational non-acoustic systems and will deploy more in the next few years.” It wasn’t a question of if the Russians were coming. They were here. (And probably working at the CIA!)

When Team B looked at the “soft” data concerning Soviet strategic concepts, they slanted the evidence to support their conclusions.

Or, the shorter version:

In retrospect, the Team B report (which has since been declassified) turns out to have been wrong on nearly every point, while the CIA’s reports in those same years look pretty good.

So too it’s been with Feith’s ‘Team B’ intelligence-cooking, with its WMDs and Saddam-bin Laden links. Success all around, right?

Damn skippy, says Hugh. Institutionalize it!:

We need a permanent “Team B,” whether housed at the Department of Defense or somewhere else, and staffed by pros overseen by the smartest folks in the world of intelligence gathering.

For his part, Feith modestly tells Hugh that his operation wasn’t all that, though his heart was in the right place:

HH: Now I wrote a piece for ABC News yesterday, arguing that this was an analogous effort, your office’s effort, to the Team B effort run in the 70’s concerning the Soviets’ capabilities and intentions. Do you believe that’s a valid comparison?

DF: Well, it’s…it wasn’t quite a Team B effort, but it reflected some of the same ideas, I think, that led to the Team B effort. And the idea is that intelligence improves, and policy improves, if there is vigorous challenge, vigorous debate among policy and intelligence people. And that was, I think, the idea that gave rise to the Team B effort, as you rightly point out. And that was the idea here. This wasn’t exactly a Team B, because the people in my office were not actually producing an alternative intelligence assessment. We’ve been accused of that, it just isn’t true. What they were producing was a critique of the CIA’s work.

But basically, ‘Fucking Stupid’ Dougie isn’t interested in rehashing all that. No. He’d rather hilariously convey to Hugh that the Feithian gift for Nostradomasing has never left him, thank you very much! Dougie knew what we were getting into! He accurately predicted all sorts of things, now come true, that the cruel Lefties won’t give him credit for. Why, if they only knew that he:

HH: Let me go on to two other quick questions with you, Mr. Feith. One is in the interview with Chris Wallace, you made a statement which I had never seen before, which was that your shop did in fact, “make the case against the war, yes, and we explained what we thought all the problems would be in going to war, because we wanted the President to know that.� By that you mean…explain to me what that means, because that’s a stunner to me.

DF: Yeah, what happened was, and this story is at least partly recounted in Woodward’s latest book, and I’m going to be discussing it at some length in the book that I’m writing. Secretary Rumsfeld put together a memo, and he worked on it over several months, that listed everything that he could think of that could go wrong in the event of war. And he gathered his top Pentagon leadership, military and civilian, and we sat down and worked through a list of all the things that we could think of that would be arguments against going to war, and things that could go wrong in the event that we go to war, and put that together, and then Secretary Rumsfeld took it, and took it to the President and the National Security Council, and walked everybody through it. And he did that because he wanted to make sure before the decision was actually taken to go to war, that the government at its highest levels had given truly serious consideration to the best thinking that we could bring to the subject. And it was actually quite an impressive memo. And interestingly enough, while there were other agencies of the government that also did some pieces speculating about the problems that could occur in the event of war, I think Secretary Rumsfeld’s list was probably more serious, more comprehensive, graver, grimmer than anything produced by anybody else around the government.

[…]

HH: And did the Secretary of Defense’s memo underestimate what has actually transpired in Iraq, Mr. Feith?

DF: Well, some of the problems it hit on…I mean, he didn’t have a perfect crystal ball, but he definitely hit some of the problems, and then of course there were other problems that have arisen that he didn’t hit. But the point is not whether…to my mind, the point is not whether he had perfect seer capabilities. The point is that the notion that people in the Pentagon were pushing for war, and were trying to cherry pick information to persuade the President to go to war, and suppress any thought that might make the President reluctant to go to war, is complete nonsense, and is refuted by the written record, because in fact, we wanted the President and the whole National Security Council to take very seriously the full range of considerations, what would be the problems if we go to war, and what would be the problems if we don’t go to war.

HH: And Mr. Feith, looking back, knowing what we know now, do you still believe the decision to invade Iraq was a good one?

DF: Well, I think that the President made a completely responsible decision when he evaluated the dangers that Saddam posed to the United States. And the whole history of Iraq’s hostility and aggression and working with various terrorist groups, and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, and use of weapons of mass destruction over the years, and he looked at all the risks of leaving Saddam in power, I think he made the right decision that while it was obviously, and as Secretary Rumsfeld helped point out, very risky to remove Saddam from power, it was enormously risky to leave him in power. And I think the President made a sound judgment in deciding to remove him.

See? First volley in the Let’s Rehab Doug Feith’s Reputation Project: He didn’t say it’d be a cakewalk. What a relief! Put this guy back in government!