Pentagon unit defied CIA advice to justify Iraq war

Donald Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans, which was overseen by Douglas Feith, manipulated intelligence exaggerating the link between al Qaeda and Saddam's Iraqi regime in order to bolster the government's case for war in Iraq the Senate was informed yesterday.

"The office of the under-secretary of defence for policy developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community, to senior decision-makers," the report says.

Mr Feith's office was the source for some of the most glaring examples of faulty intelligence during the run-up to the war. In 2002 it promoted the idea that there had been a meeting between the lead September 11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. The intelligence community has never established this.

The unit deliberately undermined the work of intelligence agencies in briefings in August 2002 for the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and officials at the national security council, Mr Gimble said. The briefings repeated the claims about the Prague meeting but did not mention the CIA's extreme scepticism. Instead, the briefings alleged "fundamental problems with the way that the intelligence community was assessing the information".

This will come as no surprise to anyone who followed what they were up to at the time. The Office of Special Plans was the single reason that any reasonable observer before the Iraq war became convinced that, no matter what Saddam did, Bush was intent on invading.

This was an office set up, according to individuals interviewed by Seymour Hersh, "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 (WMD) that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States."

Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were also convinced that the CIA "was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,' according to Hersh's sources.

So this unit existed for one purpose, to bolster the case for a US invasion of Iraq. It did so by displaying "intelligence" of dubious quality in the worst possible light and using this "intelligence" to create a drumbeat for war that, in the end, became unstoppable.

In carrying out this task, Feith and others were greatly aided by the American press who accepted these falsehoods without question and daily reported this nonsense as if it was fact.

I remember at the time making a few simple Google searches and discovering that the shelf life of chemical weapons was about five years. We had, at that time, had Saddam under punitive sanctions for the past twelve years. I therefore reasoned that anything that Saddam may have one day possessed would surely be mush by now and was amazed that very few national newspapers were making this point. They were rather simply echoing the Bush administrations reasons for invasion without checking whether or not what they were saying made any sense.

And, as Bush has recently set up an Office of Special Plans charged with looking into Iran's possible weaponry, there has never been a better time for making sure that Press don't go to sleep a second time.

Glenn Greenwald has linked to a set of questions from the Nieman Watchdog site that desperately need answering by any enquiry into how the US Press fell asleep at the wheel and allowed Bush and his cohorts to basically fabricate a case for war. They include:

Why did the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau’s “against-the grain reporting” during the build-up to war receive such “disappointing play,” in the words of its former bureau chief?

* Why, on the eve of war, did the Washington Post’s executive editor reject a story by Walter Pincus, its experienced and knowledgeable national security reporter, that questioned administration claims of hidden Iraqi weapons and why, when the editor reconsidered, the story ran on Page 17?

* Why did the Post, to the “dismay” of the paper’s ombudsman, bury in the back pages or miss stories that challenged the administration’s version of events? Or, as Pincus complained, why did Post editors go “through a whole phase in which they didn’t put things on the front page that would make a difference” while, from August 2002 to the start of the war in March 2003, did the Post, according to its press critic, Howard Kurtz, publish “more than 140 front-page stories that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq”?

* Why did Michael Massing’s critique of Iraq-war coverage, in the New York Review of Books, conclude that “The Post was not alone. The nearer the war drew, and the more determined the administration seemed to wage it, the less editors were willing to ask tough questions. The occasional critical stories that did appear were…tucked well out of sight.”

* Why did the Times’s Thomas E. Friedman and other foreign affairs specialists, who should have known better, join the “let’s-go-to-war” chorus?

* Why did Colin Powell’s pivotal presentation to the United Nations receive immediate and overwhelming press approval despite its evident weaknesses and even fabrications?

* Why did the British press, unlike its American counterpart, critically dissect the speech and regard it with scorn?

* Why did the Associated Press wait six months, when the body count began to rise, to distribute a major piece by AP’s Charles Hanley challenging Powell’s evidence and why did Hanley say how frustrating it had been until then to break through the self-censorship imposed by his editors on negative news about Iraq?

The reasons for the disgraceful absence of the United States Press as a watchful Fourth Estate are painfully obvious, as Greenwald again links to:

The press response to the build-up to the Iraq war simply is the latest manifestation of an underlying and ongoing reluctance to dissent from authority and prevailing opinion when emotions run high, especially on matters of war and peace, when the country most needs a questioning, vigorous press.

And the greatest irony in all of this is that the architects of this war, the people who lied and manipulated the intelligence in order to lead the country into war, not only have suffered no punishment for their dreadful actions, they are not even expressing regret.

Mr Feith, who left the Pentagon in 2005 for a post at Georgetown University, yesterday played down the influence of his unit. "This was not an alternative intelligence assessment," he told the Washington Post. "It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance."

So Feith now claims that he "was not endorsing it's substance". This is what is known as lying with impunity.

As Bush and his cohorts now take aim at Iran, one would hope that any "intelligence" they present will be met with a much more critical eye than the one that greeted Feith's offerings from the Office of Special Plans. Offering's that even he now claims he never really believed in.

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tag: Office of Special Plans, most right wing administration ever, Iraq, Iraq war, Douglas Feith, Donald Rumsfeld,