Doug Feith got off easy.

He’s not in handcuffs, getting a mug shot like some astronaut.

He wasn’t duck-walked out his office with a bag over his head.

But Congress got off pretty easy itself.

You won’t hear much this week about Congress’ failure to ride herd on Feith and his co-conspirators to twist the intelligence on Iraq and stampede the country into war.

You will hear plenty about Feith, whom disgraced Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld put to work cooking the books on Iraq, and his other patrons, Vice President Dick Cheney and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, his hatchet man.

Talk about a slap on the wrist: the Defense Department’s inspector general called Feith’s behavior merely “inappropriate,” not criminal.

Oh, sure, Feith got a rhetorical beating from the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

And he didn’t even have to sit there and take it. He’s teaching at Georgetown University these days, with the title of visiting professor and distinguished practitioner in national security policy.

Last fall he taught a course on “the Bush Administration’s strategy behind the war on terrorism,” the Jesuit school said.

“I wonder if they’re having buyer’s remorse” jibed a friend.

Sen. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who’s still getting used to chairing the Senate Armed Services Committee, opened his remarks by reminding everybody how right he was on Iraq.

“More than two years ago, in October of 2004,” Levin said, looking as fierce as a man can peering over his bifocals, “I issued a report on the alternative analysis of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, which was prepared and disseminated by the Office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under the leadership of Douglas Feith.

“My report,” Levin continued, “documented a number of actions taken by Undersecretary Feith and his staff to produce an alternative intelligence analysis of the alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in order to help make the case to go to war against Iraq.”

“Alternative analysis” — doesn’t that sound like “an alterative route” to some place, both being roughly equal?

If Feith had only produced an “alternative analysis,” of course, there probably wouldn’t be more than 3,100 American troops dead, and another 30,000 wounded, in Iraq.

But Feith and the White House weren’t selling the Saddam-al Qaeda connection as an “alternative analysis,” they were selling it as proof — another thing entirely.

Iraq wasn’t in league with al Qaeda, as Feith & Co. — and their boosters at Fox and The Weekly Standard — maintained.

In fact, as even the CIA knew, the self-righteous Osama bin Laden loathed the scotch-swilling Saddam Hussein, a Muslim in name only.

The cave man had been displaying his disdain for Hussein long before his agents attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001, to any journalist who trekked into the Afghan mountains for an interview.

In 2002, bin Laden even called on Iraqis to rise up and oust Saddam.

Yet in the face of such readily available material, the only theoretically non-partisan intelligence committees instead helped the administration with their own cherry-picking on the Iraq-al Qaeda question.

One of the worst offenders was Rep. Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican who was supposed to be watching the intelligence with a gimlet eye.

Goss never missed a chance to showcase pro-war hacks and quacks during his eight-years as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

In Sept. 2004, when the former CIA operative came over to the Senate Intelligence Committee for a pro-forma confirmation hearing on his nomination to run the spy agency, Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., asked about Feith’s boiler room operation.

“Do you feel the Department of Defense under Secretary Rumsfeld and Assistant Secretary [Paul] Wolfowitz . . . and Mr. Douglas Feith, have gone too far in creating an alternative intelligence effort?” Durbin asked.

Goss would hardly admit that Feith existed.

“I believe he’s not actually in the intelligence community,” Goss said. “He’s in the policy side of the community.”

For his pliant service, the White House catapulted Goss from the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee to a disastrous brief tenure as CIA chief.

Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who headed the Senate Intelligence Committee until last month, took a similar head-in-the-sand attitude all through the run-up to the war and ever since, refusing to publish his own panel’s work on the manipulation of information.

When Goss appeared before Roberts’ committee, he did concede, cautiously, that the administration might have used bogus sources for its skewered intelligence.

“We found out in the oversight committees that there was a question with the sourcing,” he said. “The information that came through that channel was not, in my view, sufficiently explained.”

It was as if it was somebody else’s job to get to the truth.

“But Mr. Goss,” said Durbin, nonplussed, “we found out after we invaded. We found out after we had committed 140,000 troops. We found out after hundreds of Americans lost their lives.”

That was in 2004. Now, of course, it’s thousands.

But you won’t find Congress taking its share of the blame for bad Iraq intell — not that there’s any blame to take, some Republicans still insist.

“The Intelligence Committee . . . found that there was no basis for any allegations that have been made against the undersecretary,” Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla, said at a Feb. 9 hearing, before running out to catch a plane.

“Congressional oversight of intelligence is broken,” said a report last summer from the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank that has taken a more muscular approach to national security issues than its liberal forebears.

Partisan warfare, said the experts, was largely to blame.

Plus, many members of the intelligence oversight panels just don’t care enough to understand the issues

What’s in it for me? they think — can’t brag about it back home.

Or as the report put it, because they are “unable to advertise the details of their service, they have less incentive to take the time to work through the complexity.”

They don’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, you might say.

Even the overseers of the overseers, the 9/11 Commission, “did not systematically examine the functioning of [the House Intelligence Committee] nor did it hear from a single witness from the Appropriations Committee to get its perspective on oversight problems or possibilities for improvement, “ notes Scott Lilly, who spent 31 years in important Hill jobs, including staff director of the House Appropriations Committee.

You can’t force members of Congress to bone up on the enemy, but the system they work in has to be fixed, he said.

Getting a choke hold on the intelligence agencies’ budgets is mandatory for Congress, wrote Lilly in an essay last December.

Until the Intelligence committees get it, they won’t, well, get it.

“[T]he best oversight of intelligence in recent years has been performed by the [House] appropriations committee,” Lilly wrote, “which has not only several senior legislative staff dedicated to the examination of intelligence budgets and oversight, but also has an entire team of investigators performing audits and examining program effectiveness.”

In other words, it’s all about the money — still.

All the rest is bull.

Speaking of Iraq intel: U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler put another cone of silence last week over the case of a fired CIA employee who collected prewar intelligence that Saddam Hussein was not developing weapons of mass destruction.

The anonymous plaintiff says the CIA conspired to ruin his career because his findings ran contrary to the administration’s position that Iraq had nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

The CIA moved to have the case dismissed, but on Jan. 12 Kessler said the former CIA employee was “plausible.”

“For example, he knows that the CIA initiated two investigations and he knows he was subsequently fired,” she wrote. “It is not unreasonable to conclude, as plaintiff has alleged, that information recorded in his files as a result of the investigations was the cause of his termination.”

The judge also scheduled a status hearing on the case for last Friday, Feb. 9 — but ordered the plaintiff’s attorneys not to tell the media about it until hours after it was over.

What a gag.

Kessler ruled that the CIA employee’s lawyers could proceed into discovery.

Grey Matter: The author of “Ghost Plane,” an acclaimed new book on the CIA’s clandestine counterterrorist kidnapping program, wrote to say he begged to differ with my argument here last week that none of the CIA people charged by a German prosecutor has much to worry about — as long as they don’t travel to Europe, where arrests warrants have been issued.

“I agree the warrants will have little impact on most of the CIA operatives involved personally,” said Stephen Grey, a British investigative reporter. ”But it will impact on the CIA pilots named in the latest warrant: Try getting work as a pilot if you can’t fly over Europe.”

Point well taken.

“More significantly, all these inquiries mean an unwelcome scrutiny on all sorts of on-going CIA activity on the continent,” he continued.

“Most Euro governments may have been quite complicit in all these things before, but they won’t welcome any more flaps. And that’s a particular problem in Germany which has been such a logistical base.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.