Reply #30: Great point! 'Office of Special Plans' had major role in all this treason.

[Octafish]

Thanks, OmmmSweetOmmm! Yours is a most important point.

The OSP was the Pentagon's in-house custom-order intelligence agency.

Office of Special Plans

In the days after September 11 terrorist attacks, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith started cooking intelligence to meet the needs of the radically new foreign and military policy that included regime change in Iraq as its top priority.

To bolster the Iraq war party, they needed intelligence that would persuade the U.S. public and policymakers that Saddam Hussein’s regime should be one of the first targets of the war on terrorism. Convinced that the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the State Department would not provide them with type of alarmist threat assessments necessary to justify a preventive war, they created their own tightly controlled intelligence operation at the top levels of the Pentagon bureaucracy.

The day after the September 11 attacks Wolfowitz authorized the creation of an informal team focused on ferreting out damaging intelligence about Iraq. This loosely organized team soon became the Office of Special Plans (OSP) directed by Abram Shulsky, formerly of RAND and the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC). The objective of this closet intelligence team, according to Rumsfeld, was to “search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists.” OSP’s mission was to create intelligence that the Pentagon and vice president could use to press their case for an Iraq invasion with the president and Congress.

The OSP played a key role in providing Rumseld, Cheney, and the president himself with the intelligence frequently cited to justify the March 2003 invasion. By late 2003 the OSP was closed down, having accomplished its mission of providing the strategic intelligence cited by the administration in the build-up to the invasion. OSP’s staff and operations were folded back into the normal operations of the NESA and into its Office of Northern Gulf Affairs.

Feith oversaw these efforts to provide the type of “strategic intelligence” needed to drive this policy agenda. As the Pentagon’s top policy official in Middle East affairs, Feith had oversight authority of the DOD’s Near East and South Asia bureau (NESA). That office came under the direct supervision of William Luti, a retired Navy officer who is a Newt Gingrich protégé and who has long advocated a U.S. military invasion of Iraq.

When OSP was operating at top capacity--just prior to the invasion--it counted on a staff of eighteen. But a stream of consultants and collaborators flowed in and out the OSP, bypassing normal intelligence procedures and protocol. Operating independently of the established intelligence apparatus, OSP dispensed with the normal guidelines for vetting information. Instead, in the rush to make the case for preventive war, the OSP routinely “stovepiped” its strategic intelligence directly to the top administration officials who then took this unfiltered information directly to the president. As Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq and author of The Threatening Storm, told investigative reporter Seymour Hersh: What the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policy makers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership.” (2)

CONTINUED...

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/govt/osp.php

There's a reason Tommy Franks called Douglas Feith "The dumbest fucking guy on the planet."



That's really saying something.