As Doug Feith’s 2-year term at Georgetown expires, several questions remain. Was his ouster organized by liberal faculty members? What does Foreign Service Dean Galluci think of it all? Has anyone at Georgetown ever been so much a war criminal (besides Henry Kissinger, obvs.)?
For a few Georgetown students, however, one question looms above all: how can we use an online petition to save him? Save Professor Feith and the Diversity of Thought worries that Feith is the SFS’s killer app: “We do not want to lose a preeminent foreign policy scholar to another university and jeopardize our status as the nation’s preeminent government and foreign policy institution.”
The petition’s been signed 59 people. But how many who signed are really concerned with diversity of thought and not motivated by other, more sinister agendas? According to the site, notable signatories include
- Henry Kissinger (Hard Knocks 2009)
- Dorit Feith (Michigan ‘07). Daughter?
- Feith Tortures. This signature was deleted, but it speaks to the petition’s persuasiveness if it could even win over that guy.
Can the internet, the medium which heaped so much ridicule on Feith, save his academic career? Probably not!
-Will Sommer, Blog Editor
Entries (RSS)
April 28th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
When I loaded the petition, I got perhaps the best Google Ad ever. Check it: http://i27.tinypic.com/zwc87b.jpg.
Google has brilliantly deduced that there’s almost a 1-to-1 ratio between those who want to keep Feith at Georgetown and those who love Bush so much that they want to hear his voice whenever their phone rings.
April 28th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
That’s amazing. Is the ringtone really Bush talking? I can’t imagine what he’d say.
April 28th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Why is Feith a war criminal? Because you disagree with his policies? That is pretty shallow and beneath serious people.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
You know that’s not why, Mark. It’s because of his role in US torture policy and the invasion of Iraq.
May 27th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Mark:
Read Phillipe Sands’ “Torture Team”
It is very clear how Feith and Rumsfeld, by abandoning FM 35-42, the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution of the United States.
From the VF excerpt:
Feith confirms that the logic of the law was not followed with respect to Geneva, rather it deliberately created a legal black hole into which the detainees were meant to fall—and that was the point. “Didn’t the administration’s approach mean that Geneva’s constraints on interrogation couldn’t be invoked by anyone at Guantánamo?” Sands asked Feith. “Oh yes, sure,” Feith replied. “Was that the intended result?” “Absolutely.” Sands writes that he asked again: Under the Geneva Conventions, no one at Guantánamo was entitled to any protection? “That’s the point,” Feith reiterated. As he saw it, either you were a detainee to whom Geneva didn’t apply (al-Qaeda fighters, because they weren’t part of a state); or you were a detainee to whom Geneva applied but whose rights you couldn’t invoke (members of the Taliban, because they hadn’t worn uniforms or insignia). What was the difference for the purpose on interrogation? Sands asked. Feith answered with a certain satisfaction: “It turns out, none. But that’s the point.”
When Sands asks Feith whether he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority, Feith tells Sands, “The problem with moral authority” was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”
June 30th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
[…] to conservative talk radio came in handy today when I found newly-former Georgetown professor Doug Feith on the Dennis Prager Show. Apparently, Feith isn’t too happy […]