sounds like it to me. Didn't they change their name recently? Something like the Iraq Working Group?
I just sent out my site newsletter tonight -- and what was featured in it? The OSP and how it was used to gin up the evidence for Bush to invade Iraq.
What timing. :)
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On Friday, July 7, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its final report on their investigation into pre-invasion Iraqi intelligence information. In the report, the panel concluded the CIA "provided false and unfounded assessments of the threat posed by Iraq that the Bush administration relied on to justify going to war."
But this report only covers half of the true story. Due to the insistence of the Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, an investigation into the White House's role in the gathering and use of Iraqi intelligence information was NOT allowed. Instead, the matter is to be covered in a separate report, due to be published after the 2004 election.
Those who have been following this story closely know that this second investigation has the potential to reveal the whole truth, and could help finally expose the circumstances that drove the US to war.
In this edition of the Do You Know Update, we'll focus on this question, taking a look at the Office of Special Plans and its hand in the invasion of Iraq.
Office of Special Plans
Here are four excellent articles and reports on a secret Pentagon intelligence group set up by Donald Rumsfeld in October of 2001. The purpose of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) was to gather data from various intelligence sources and create the evidence that George W. Bush needed to convince Americans of the need to invade Iraq. The articles cover the formation of the OSP, the manipulation and subversion of the CIA's intelligence data by the group, and the use of OSP material by George W. Bush to convince Americans that invading Iraq was necessary.
"The Spies Who Pushed for War", by Julian Borger
http://www.doyouknow.org/cgi-bin/r/r.cgi?k=1087"CIA Probe Finds Secret Pentagon Group Manipulated Intelligence on Iraqi Threat", by Jason Leopold
http://www.doyouknow.org/cgi-bin/r/r.cgi?k=1088"Selective Intelligence", by Seymour M. Hersh
http://www.doyouknow.org/cgi-bin/r/r.cgi?k=1089"Office of Special Plans," Right Web Profiles
http://www.doyouknow.org/cgi-bin/r/r.cgi?k=1090__________________________________________________-
And from the Right Web site:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/govt/osp.php...
This “cabal” did not operate in complete isolation from other government agencies. However, it worked almost exclusively with like-minded neocon political appointees in the National Security Council, the State Department, and the office of the vice president. NESA and its subproject OSP maintained close relations with the Defense Policy Board, whose members were picked by Feith and approved by Rumsfeld. Initially chaired by Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the DPB was as nest of neocon and other rightists--including such figures as Elliot Cohen, Newt Gingrich, David Jeremiah, Kenneth Adelman, and James Woolsey. Perle, who stepped down as chairman (but remained on the board), had served as Feith’s mentor during the Reagan administration.
...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.
Right Web connections to the OSP:
Ahmad Chalabi
Richard Cheney
Douglas Feith
Newt Gingrich
William Luti
Donald Rumsfeld
Abram Shulsky
Paul Wolfowitz
Project for the New American Century
National Strategy Information Center
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http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/schulsky/schulsky.phpAbram Shulsky, a Leo Strauss scholar and intelligence expert associated with the Project for the New American Century, is best known for his work in the Office of Special Plans, a secretive intelligence outfit in the Pentagon that was charged with digging up information on Iraq that would support the administration's arguments for going to war. According to an expose by the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the Office of Special Plans, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz and began its work soon after the 9/11 terrorists attacks, "has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts . . . have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi." (1)
By late 2002, says Hersh, the Office of Special Plans had overshadowed the C.I.A. and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., and become Bush's main intelligence source on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and on Hussein's alleged Al Qaeda connections. Hersh continues, "Although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question.
...The director of the Special Plans operation is Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Shulsky has been quietly working on intelligence and foreign-policy issues for three decades; he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early nineteen-eighties and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration, after which he joined the Rand Corporation. The Office of Special Plans is overseen by Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti, a retired Navy captain. Luti was an early advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the Administration moved toward war and policymaking power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities." (1)
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/schulsky/schulsky.phpAnd from The Nation back in June of 2003:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20030707&s=dreyfussAs the Pentagon scours Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi links to Al Qaeda, it's increasingly obvious that the Bush Administration either distorted or deliberately exaggerated the intelligence used to justify the war against Iraq. But an even bigger intelligence scandal is waiting in the wings: the fact that members of the Administration failed to produce an intelligence evaluation of what Iraq might look like after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Instead, they ignored fears expressed by analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department who predicted that postwar Iraq would be chaotic, violent and ungovernable, and that Iraqis would greet the occupying armies with firearms, not flowers.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, it turns out that the same people are responsible for both. According to current and former US intelligence analysts and government officials, the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans funneled information, unchallenged, from Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who in turn passed it on to the White House, suggesting that Iraqis would welcome the American invaders. The Office of Special Plans is led by Abram Shulsky, a hawkish neoconservative ideologue who got his start in politics working alongside Elliott Abrams in Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's office in the 1970s. It was set up in fall 2001 as a two-man shop, but it burgeoned into an eighteen-member nerve center of the Pentagon's effort to distort intelligence about Iraq's WMDs and terrorist connections. A great deal of the bad information produced by Shulsky's office, which found its way into speeches by Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, came from Chalabi's INC. Since the INC itself was sustained by its neocon allies in Washington, including the shadow "Central Command" at the American Enterprise Institute, it stands as perhaps the ultimate example of circular reasoning.
"The same unit
that fed Chalabi's intelligence on WMD to Rumsfeld was also feeding him Chalabi's stuff on the prospects for postwar Iraq," said a leading US government expert on the Middle East. Says a former US ambassador with strong links to the CIA: "There was certainly information coming from the Iraqi exile community, including Chalabi--who was detested by the CIA and by the State Department--saying, 'They will welcome you with open arms.'" Rumsfeld's willingness to accept that view led him to contradict the Chief of Staff of the US Army, who predicted that it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to control Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, a view that seems prescient today.
According to the former official, also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled Shulsky's--and which has not previously been reported--prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service, because the Mossad--which prides itself on extreme professionalism--had views closer to the CIA's, not the Pentagon's, on Iraq.
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Forgot about this from Karen Kwiatkowski:
"In early winter, an incident occurred that was seared into my memory. A coworker and I were suddenly directed to go down to the Mall entrance to pick up some Israeli generals. Post-9/11 rules required one escort for every three visitors, and there were six or seven of them waiting. The Navy lieutenant commander and I hustled down. Before we could apologize for the delay, the leader of the pack surged ahead, his colleagues in close formation, leaving us to double-time behind the group as they sped to Undersecretary Feith's office on the fourth floor. Two thoughts crossed our minds: are we following close enough to get credit for escorting them, and do they really know where they are going? We did get credit, and they did know. Once in Feith's waiting room, the leader continued at speed to Feith's closed door. An alert secretary saw this coming and had leapt from her desk to block the door. "Mr. Feith has a visitor. It will only be a few more minutes." The leader craned his neck to look around the secretary's head as he demanded, "Who is in there with him?"
This minor crisis of curiosity past, I noticed the security sign-in roster. Our habit, up until a few weeks before this incident, was not to sign in senior visitors like ambassadors. But about once a year, the security inspectors send out a warning letter that they were coming to inspect records. As a result, sign-in rosters were laid out, visible and used. I knew this because in the previous two weeks I watched this explanation being awkwardly presented to several North African ambassadors as they signed in for the first time and wondered why and why now. Given all this and seeing the sign-in roster, I asked the secretary, "Do you want these guys to sign in?" She raised her hands, both palms toward me, and waved frantically as she shook her head. "No, no, no, it is not necessary, not at all." Her body language told me I had committed a faux pas for even asking the question. My fellow escort and I chatted on the way back to our office about how the generals knew where they were going (most foreign visitors to the five-sided asylum don't) and how the generals didn't have to sign in. I felt a bit dirtied by the whole thing and couldn't stop comparing that experience to the grace and gentility of the Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian ambassadors with whom I worked."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.
In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.
The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.
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