The new Pentagon papers

[John Reynolds]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp/index_np.html

From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it.

 

[digitalwanderer]

This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it.

If you take out the "working in the Near East South Asia policy office" it's a whole lot more accurate.

 

[RussSchultz]

She's had an axe to grind for over two years. Spend a little time and research who she is and what she's written.

She's a bit of a right wing nut, apparently.

 

[kyleb]

ad hominem?

 

[Sonic]

Come on, Illimunati rules all.

 

[RussSchultz]

ad hominem?

Are you asking for one, or...?

 

[DemoCoder]

Office politics exists everywhere. That's why you have to be skeptical.

 

[kyleb]

ad hominem?

Are you asking for one, or...?

no, i'm asking why you bothered with one.

 

[John Reynolds]

I'd just like to see someone refute the "tunnel vision" effect the OSP had on intelligence being given to the executive branch. I mean, I trust Salon.com to be as objective as a Ralph Murdoch media outlet, so I really would like to see this dissected.

And I don't think Russ' post was ad hominem in nature.

 

[RussSchultz]

I'm not sure what there is to refute. A person, who obviously disagreed with the actions taken, is very very vocal and repeats the meme that we were on a path to war driven by the shadowy neocons and their lust for whatever, using anecdotal and unproven evidence...nay, assertations to prove her assertations.

The war was inevitable, but it had more to do with Saddam playing brinksmanship than it did with any war lusts.

 

[John Reynolds]

So you don't find it in any way coincidental that a new intelligence group would be created, the OSP, staffed by neo-cons that would provide analysis condusive to neo-con plans? If George Tenet was doing his job well, as has been stated, why was the OSP even created? Why isn't the intelligence commission allowed to investigate the role the OSP might or might not have played in our failure to interpret the intelligence accurately?

I'm really more curious as to why the radical departure from previous international norms when it comes to American policies? Can we really attribute it all to 9/11, however horrific it was? Even as a conservative, I'm just not that willing to be so fast in dispelling or disregarding such abrupt shifts in diplomatic and military policies, particularly those that end with a considerable amount of mud on our faces in the eyes of the internatinoal community.

Edit: Oh, and I don't think there's anything "shadowy" about Wolfowitz and Perle. There's nothing Illumanati-like in this situation, IMO.

 

[RussSchultz]

I have no idea about the OSP. The only thing you can read about it is in the anti-war screeds where it is decried as "a hand picked bunch of war mongers who cherry picked intelligence to build a case for war".

As far as I can tell, it may not even exist.

 

[John Reynolds]

I think it's been too widely reported by too many different sources to be pure fiction.

 

[RussSchultz]

I swear, I googled and all I got were hits on commondreams, antiwar, and other similarly stanced blogs.

The information must have come from somewhere, but its been lost in a torrent of repetitiveness that makes me wonder how much this OSP really existed as an official group, or just an informal group, or even a figment of some exotic story teller that got repeated because it was a meme that people wanted to believe (war hawks pulling all the strings and misleading the people--never mind that every sane government thought the same thing ours did, they just didn't want to deal with it)

 

[John Reynolds]

If interested there's quite a few links at the bottom of this page: http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Office_of_Special_Plans

Most are from admittedly liberal sources, and I haven't read through all of them. For the OSP to not have existed would require quite an amount of brazen lying by a handful of people, something I can't see Rumsfield sitting back and taking.

 

[RussSchultz]

Oh, I read those, too.

But they all say essentially the same thing, and the existance of such an office doesn't seem to exist outside that self purpetuating group.

I'm not saying it doesn't, but....

 

[kyleb]

And I don't think Russ' post was ad hominem in nature.

his comments were toward the author instead of the topic; has the nature of ad hominem changed while i wasn't looking?

 

[Natoma]

OSP stuff:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3403532/

There was, within the administration, another office parsing through intelligence on the Iraqi and terror threat. The Office of Special Plans was so secretive at first that the director, William Luti, did not even want to mention its existence. “Don’t ever talk about this,†Luti told his staff, according to a source who attended early meetings. “If anybody asks, just say no comment.†(Luti does not recall this, but he does regret choosing such a spooky name for the office.) The Office of Special Plans has sometimes been described as an intelligence cell, along the lines of “Team B,†set up by the Ford administration in the 1970s to second-guess the CIA when conservatives believed that the intelligence community was underestimating the Soviet threat. But OSP is more properly described as a planning group—planning for war in Iraq. Some of the OSP staffers were true believers. Abe Shulsky, a defense intellectual who ran the office under Luti, was a Straussian, a student of a philosopher named Leo Strauss, who believed that ancient texts had hidden meanings that only an elite could divine. Strauss taught that philosophers needed to tell —â€noble lies†to the politicians and the people.

The OSP gathered up bits and pieces of intelligence that pointed to Saddam’s WMD programs and his ties to terror groups. The OSP would prepare briefing papers for administration officials to use. The OSP also drew on reports of defectors who alleged that Saddam was hiding bio and chem weapons under hospitals and schools. Some of these defectors were provided to the intelligence community by Chalabi, who also fed them to large news organizations, like The New York Times. Vanity Fair published a few of the more lurid reports, deemed to be bogus by U.S. intelligence agencies (like one alleging that Saddam was running a terrorist-training camp, complete with a plane fuselage in which to practice hijackings). The CIA was skeptical about the motivation and credibility of these defectors, but their stories gained wide circulation.

This TIME Article on pre-war intelligence links to this New Yorker Article on the OSP:

According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.

..............

Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. “The agency was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,†the Pentagon adviser told me. “That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.†The goal of Special Plans, he said, was “to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see. Shulsky’s carrying the heaviest part.â€

i.e., they're not giving us what we want, so we're going to do it ourselves.

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,454725,00.html

It was disclosed that the Central Intelligence Agency is trying to figure out, among other things, how we came to the questionable conclusion that Saddam Hussein possessed massive stocks of illegal weapons. The CIA will surely look into the activities of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, an intelligence nodule created by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to provide a hawkish counterforce against the other spy services. The Pentagon's extreme threat assessment, which relied heavily on dubious reports from Iraqi defectors, carried the day in the White House.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3660169/

For months, Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two “U.S. governmental recipients†for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, “defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzedâ€; the info was then reported to, among others, “appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.†The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a “principal point of contact†for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney’s staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans.

There's more from Newsweek, US News & World Reports, TIME, and other sources. I'm not surprised you didn't find much googling. Only reason I was able to find these links is because I subscribe and remembered reading articles on this in the past, so I went to the sites themselves. Google is great, but it aint all powerful.... Yet.

 

[Druga Runda]

well it wouldn't be the first time nor the last that the politicians are trying to get their way for whatever personal reasons no matter what the estabilished agencies or people underneath them say.

The worse part of it is that it happened in US and UK despite the huge public outcry in the runup to war, and both governments actually said to the public -fuck you - fully knowing they don't have the data support that is neccessary to make the action legally and morally acceptable - well it is obvious as if they had the data they would present it and convince the public otherwise which was attempted with those two bogus dossiers in the UK. Second one even worse!!! than the first (usualy second attampts are better)...

So that's what really is sad, IMHO for such ignorant behaviour both governments should stand down if they had any respect for their countries. What do you have proper agencies there for other than provide you with useful data on how to govern your country or why to go to war. And if they give you no reason you should not try to override them with your "superior" opinion. Well if you do, and you are proven to have been wrong (as expected) you should get sacked IMHO.

 

[John Reynolds]

I read this post on another message board yesterday concerning the neo-con agenda:

What you described is not noble. Its garbage. Globalism is the only result that will emerge out of Neocon thinking. Its Imperialism all over again. Its "I see a state that is acting with discord. I will then invade and "rebuild" them under new laws, new democratic laws where everyone will be peaceful and happy".

So this implies a kind of threat. "Play nice" or we will invade and take you over. This would work "ok" in a world where people CAN play nice and still achieve noble ends. Humans have not yet proven they can achieve this. Internal war is perfectly fine.

We have no right to oppress the world into a false peace. We have no right to force the world in OUR kind of peace, into OUR kind of government, into OUR kind of morality.

No set of ideals, no form of government, no set of morals exists on the earth that DESERVES to be made global. Any accomplishment of such a thing will be an atrocity such as the world has never seen, and make the Holocaust seem like a walk in the park in comparison.

And using the Holocaust as a JUSTIFICATION for such a course of action is just sad. One atrocity does not justify a far greater one.

I do not favor the terrorists of today. None of them have noble goals that I have seen. But if the world ever approaches Globalism terrorists will be the last recourse. The hope.

Don't you think that's the REAL attitude of the Neocon agenda toward terrorism? Its all well and good to use specific terrorist actions as an excuse to "kill terrorism", but look deeper.

Terrorism is the only threat to a Global community. A Global community implies no *state* that does not conform, which leaves only individuals who then coordinate into small agencies. With "majority rule" these agencies have no other power, so they conduct "terrorist" actions.

If the Neocon agenda develops, one day Terrorism will be noble, and that day may be soon approaching.

Welcome to the 21st century.

It's in reply to someone defending Strauss' "noble lie", which our invasion of Iraq certainly smacks of.