How the American public was deceived by the Office of Special Plans.

[Purrfessor]

The Bush Administration’s plan to blame intelligence agencies for providing faulty intelligence in the run-up to war in Iraq is the equivalent of storing water in a fishing net. There are so many holes in this tactic, including contradictions and a profusion of magazine and newspaper articles that dispute this assertion, that their efforts to shift the blame are certain to fail; providing, of course, the media does not assist the administration in the attempted cover-up of this atrocity.

In this post I have included snippets from half-a-dozen articles that contest Bush’s claim of faulty intelligence provided to him by the CIA and other agencies, along with a speech by Douglas Feith that includes a rather astounding statement regarding the number of people who worked in the OSP.

Please feel free to make any additions to this list, and let’s see just how much information we can gather to point out the folly of Bush’s blame-everybody-but-me diversion.

US rivals turn on each other as weapons search draws a blank

One key argument for war was the peril from weapons of mass destruction. Now top officials are worried by repeated failures to find the proof - and US intelligence agencies are engaged in a struggle to avoid the blame

Paul Harris and Martin Bright in London, Taji and Ed Helmore in New York Sunday May 11, 2003

The Iraqi military base at Taji does not look like a place of global importance. It is a desolate expanse of bunkers and hangars surrounded by barbed wire and battered look-out posts. It is deserted apart from American sentries at the gate.

Yet Taji, north of Baghdad, is the key to a furious debate. Where are Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? Was the war fought on a platform of lies?

<snip>

The search (for WMD) is especially vital for The Cabal. In the brave new world of post-11 September America, this tight group of analysts deep in the heart of the Pentagon has been the driving force behind the war in Iraq. Numbering no more than a dozen, The Cabal is part of the Office of Special Plans, a new intelligence agency which has taken on the CIA and won. Where the CIA dithered over Iraq, the OSP pressed on. Where the CIA doubted, the OSP was firm. It fought a battle royal over Iraq and George Bush came down on its side.

<snip>

The OSP reports directly to Paul Wolfowitz, a leading hawk in the administration. They bypassed the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defence Intelligence Agency when it came to whispering in the President's ear. They argued a forceful case for war against Saddam before his weapons programmes came to fruition. More moderate voices in the CIA and DIA were drowned out. The result has been a flurry of leaks to the US press. One CIA official described The Cabal's members as 'crazed', on a 'mission from God'.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,953604,00.html

SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable?

Issue of 2003-05-12
Posted 2003-05-05

They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community.

<snip>

W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the D.I.A., said, “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.”

<snip>

A Pentagon adviser who has worked with Special Plans dismissed any criticism of the operation as little more than bureaucratic whining. “(Abram) Shulsky, (the director of the Special Plans operation), and (William) Luti, (Under-Secretary of Defense), won the policy debate,” “They beat ’em—they cleaned up against State and the C.I.A. There’s no mystery why they won—because they were more effective in making their argument. Luti is smarter than the opposition. Wolfowitz is smarter.

They out-argued them. It was a fair fight. They persuaded the President of the need to make a new security policy. Those who lose are so good at trying to undercut those who won.” He added, “I’d love to be the historian who writes the story of how this small group of eight or nine people made the case and won.”

http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact

Rumsfeld's personal spy ring

The defense secretary couldn't count on the CIA or the State Department to provide a pretext for war in Iraq. So he created a new agency that would tell him what he wanted to hear.

By Eric Boehlert
July 16, 2003 |

During last fall's feverish ramp up to war with Iraq, the Pentagon created an unusual in-house shop to monitor Saddam Hussein's links with terrorists and his allegedly sprawling arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. With direct access to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office and the White House, the influential group helped lay out, both to administration officials and to the press, an array of chilling, almost too-good-to-be-true examples of why Saddam posed an immediate threat to America.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/16/intelligence/index_np.html

On the Global War on TerrorismDouglas J. Feith, Under Secretary of Defense For Policy Speech to Council of Foreign RelationsThursday,

November 13, 2003

Speaker: Douglas FeithModerator: Robert Gallucci

Note: After Feith’s speech, in which he talked about both the war on terrorism and the preemptive strike on Iraq, the floor was opened for questions. In light of all that has been reported about how the Office of Special Plans operated, Feith’s response to Ann Kahn’s question is astounding.

Moderator: Ann?

Q: Thank you. I'm Ann Kahn from American University. If the prewar intelligence on Iraq was so uniform and so consistent in its findings as you’ve stated in your prepared remarks, why was it necessary to set up a special office of strategic planning within the Defense Department, and does that office still exist? And if not, why not?
Feith: I'm delighted that you asked that question.

Moderator: I almost believe that. {Laughter}.

Feith: No, I am, because this is a subject of such thoroughgoing misinformation that it's nice to have a chance to say something true about it.

First of all, the Office of Special Plans that you referred to has nothing really whatsoever to do with intelligence; it is one of the regional offices in the policy organization. We have regional offices for Latin America and Africa and Asia. We had - it is the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs (its original name). It was created in the fall of 2002 when we had to beef up our staff to handle all of the extra Iraq related work.

We needed to increase it by something like 18 people. So we created a new office, and since there was an enormous amount of attention on the Pentagon, on what we were doing and are we planning for war and the creation of a new office that would have been called the Iraq office would have probably in and of itself created headlines.

We chose the kind of name that the government gives to offices throughout the government that’s kind of nondescript - you know, "special plans," long-range plans" - that kind of thing and it's been grist for the conspiracy mongers ever since.
But you referred to some intelligence unit, as many press reports did, confuse it with the special plans office. The so-called intelligence unit that was much discussed - it was two people, it was two people who did a project for about - it as not a unit, it was not an office. It was two people. And they did a project for about three months, and then another two people did a follow-on project for about 6 or 7 months.

Note: See bold text in the Guardian article below that contradicts this statement by Feith on the number of people involved.

It's rather amazing that there have been numerous stories that said this was the Pentagon's effort to replace the CIA and I can assure you that we do not hold the CIA in such low regard that we think we could replace them with two people. And in fact we think we - what those people did in that so-called intelligence unit that has been written about, was simply help me read and absorb the intelligence produced by the intelligence community, the CIA and other members of the intelligence community.

So all I can say is there is, as I said, so much misinformation on this subject that I would urge everybody to treat with great skepticism what you read on that subject.

http://www.defenselink.mil/policy/speech/nov_13_03.html

Special investigation
The spies who pushed for war

Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force

Thursday July 17, 2003

As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.

It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses.

This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.

<snip>

There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing think tanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.

"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html

POLITICS-U.S.:
War Critics Zero In on Pentagon Office

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Aug 5 (IPS) - On most days, the Pentagon's 'Early Bird', a daily compilation of news articles on defence-related issues mostly from the U.S. and British press, does not shy from reprinting hard-hitting stories and columns critical of the Defence Department's top leadership.

But few could help notice last week that the 'Bird' omitted an opinion piece distributed by the Knight-Ridder news agency by a senior Pentagon Middle East specialist, Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith until her retirement in April.

''What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline,'' Kwiatkowski wrote. ''If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam (Hussein) occupation (in Iraq) has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defence'' (OSD).

Kwiatkowski went on to charge that the operations she witnessed during her tenure in Feith's office, and particularly those of an ad hoc group known as the Office of Special Plans (OSP), constituted ''a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress''.

http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=19542

The Atlantic Monthly | January/February 2004

Spies, Lies, and Weapons:
What Went Wrong

How could we have been so far off in our estimates of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs? A leading Iraq expert and intelligence analyst in the Clinton Administration—whose book The Threatening Storm proved deeply influential in the run-up to the war—gives a detailed account of how and why we erred

BY KENNETH M. POLLACK

<snip>

THE POLITICS OF PERSUASION

The intelligence community's overestimation of Iraq's WMD capability is only part of the story of why we went to war last year. The other part involves how the Bush Administration handled the intelligence. Throughout the spring and fall of 2002 and well into 2003 I received numerous complaints from friends and colleagues in the intelligence community, and from people in the policy community, about precisely that. According to them, many Administration officials reacted strongly, negatively, and aggressively when presented with information or analysis that contradicted what they already believed about Iraq.

<snip>

They (The Bush Administration) set up their own shop in the Pentagon, called the Office of Special Plans, in order to sift through the information on Iraq themselves. To a great extent OSP personnel "cherry-picked" the intelligence they passed on, selecting reports that supported the Administration's pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest.

Most problematic of all, the OSP often chose to believe reports that trained intelligence officers considered unreliable or downright false.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/pollack.htm



All right, let’s get busy documenting the truth, and do what we can to get the word out.

Purrfessor

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. kick

*

[DoYouEverWonder]

2. OSP, OSP, OSP, OSP, OSP......

The American people need to find out who is really behind all this 'faulty' intelligence and since the press no longer does their job, we have to do the job for the them. Thanks for summing it up so nicely.

[Stephanie]

3. Excellent ! Thanks! My favorite - The Spies Who Pushed for War

Astounding revelation in that one - the evidence was cherry-picked by TEMPS!