BobHarris.com - Doug Feith, for all his sins, probably did not invent an entire Dutch company

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Doug Feith, for all his sins, probably did not invent an entire Dutch company

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Thursday, 24 May 2007

For those who came in late: Doug Feith was one of the head loons who cooked up a bunch of now-discredited crap linking Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

One of the links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda that Feith pointed to involved a company called Vlemmo NV, said to be Dutch. (The "NV" is analogous to our "Inc." or "LLP.")

The Dutch government announced this week that they'd searched high and low and found no evidence whatsoever that any such company had ever existed in the Netherlands. And a bunch of lefty blogs have picked up on the report as further evidence that Feith was full of crap.

I almost did, too. But something about this didn't smell right to me. Even if Feith was obviously embroidering certain connections, it seemed doubtful to me that he'd make up an entire company. That would be too easy to discredit, even by wingnut standards.

So I did a simple Google search just now. And I plowed through the results -- many of which simply recite the Vlemmo-doesn't-exist news story -- carefully down to the very end. And there, in the bitter dregs of the Google search bin, you'll find links to two Belgian government documents. (Both are .pdfs; download here and here.)

My Dutch zuigt bigtime, but it sure as heck looks to me like a company called Vlemmo NV operated out of Antwerp, Belgium at least as early as 1997 (first document) until it went bankrupt in 2004 (second document). (Somebody who actually speaks Dutch can probably tell me if I'm reading it right. The first document seems to be a bureaucratic register in which a Vlemmo shareholders meeting is discussed on page 78. In the second document, page 125 seems to include the ruling of an Antwerp bankruptcy court, declaring Vlemmo officially over and out. Ja?)

What's more likely? That two different companies had the weird name "Vlemmo" (which, as far as I can tell is a nonsense word even in Dutch)? Or that Feith -- whom Gen. Tommy Franks notably called "the f***ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth" -- got confused by the fact that Dutch is also spoken by people who are not Dutch?

If anybody reading this is truly curious about digging further, there may be even more yummy Vlemmo goodness buried in the Belgian government documents stashed here. Nerdfest! Go for it! The online archive only goes back as far as 1997, so I have no idea yet who founded Vlemmo, much less whether they had both Saddam and Osama on speed-dial.

(Which, incidentally, wouldn't necessarily mean anything. Remember, both guys were super-rich. Saddam had investments in so many companies that he was actually a minority owner of Elle magazine, Women's Day, and Car & Driver, among a gazillion other things. And Feith's whole gig was to splice together connections with the slightest threads. That he and OSP could never really come up with much shows just how unrelated the two guys were. And never mind that Osama completely despised secular Arab governments. Etc.)