BFEE/PNAC Mob's sleazy "Office of Special Plans" exposed by Guardian

[ElementaryPenguin]

As most of us here know, this is Rummy and Wolfman's personal group of Reich Wing phony intelligence manufacturers!!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,999669,00.html

[Stephanie]

1. Just incredible!

They privatized American intelligence! No accountability! They brought in independent contractors to tell them what they wanted to hear!

<snip>"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.

As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends".

"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."

In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.

<snip>

Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees." <more>

Thanks EP - added to the http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=110&topic_id=80&mesg_id=80&page=">PNAC Links Archive

[WhoCountsTheVotes]

10. Republicans have outsourced our national security

The CIA wasn't efficient enough, so they brought in scabs.

[Stephanie]

14. I'm surprised they didn't outsource it to India!

Wouldn't that have been even cheaper?

CIA? CIA? We don't need no steenking CIA!

[WhoCountsTheVotes]

15. Maybe they will outsource our military to Communist China?

Perhaps the Republicans would like to outsource our national security to a rogue nation next?

Republicans obviously don't give a damn about the security of US citizens, whether that is our economic security or our physical security.

[TheBigGuy]

2. I think OSP has been discussed here before.

This is not really a new story.

[CWebster]

5. Well, maybe not here

but it really hasn't been aired out there.

[TheBigGuy]

8. I do post on other forums...

...so maybe it was elsewhere. The role of the OSP came out during the runup to the war.

[Classical_Liberal]

6. No it is a followup story with details, who cares.

The more papers tell the story, the more ordinary folks will here about it.

[CWebster]

3. been wondering

when this would hit.

:-)

[kalian]

4. My my...

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.

[cap]

16. from "A Clean Break"

Privatizing Israel:

"Israel has a large problem. Labor Zionism, which for 70 years has dominated the Zionist movement, has generated a stalled and shackled economy. Efforts to salvage Israel’s socialist institutions—which include pursuing supranational over national sovereignty and pursuing a peace process that embraces the slogan, "New Middle East"—undermine the legitimacy of the nation and lead Israel into strategic paralysis and the previous government’s "peace process." That peace process obscured the evidence of eroding national critical mass— including a palpable sense of national exhaustion—and forfeited strategic initiative. The loss of national critical mass was illustrated best by Israel’s efforts to draw in the United States to sell unpopular policies domestically, to agree to negotiate sovereignty over its capital, and to respond with resignation to a spate of terror so intense and tragic that it deterred Israelis from engaging in normal daily functions, such as commuting to work in buses."

Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria's regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq. This has triggered a Jordanian-Syrian rivalry to which Asad has responded by stepping up efforts to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom, including using infiltrations. Syria recently signaled that it and Iran might prefer a weak, but barely surviving Saddam, if only to undermine and humiliate Jordan in its efforts to remove Saddam.

But Syria enters this conflict with potential weaknesses: Damascus is too preoccupied with dealing with the threatened new regional equation to permit distractions of the Lebanese flank. And Damascus fears that the 'natural axis' with Israel on one side, central Iraq and Turkey on the other, and Jordan, in the center would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity.

Since Iraq's future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting the Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq, including such measures as: visiting Jordan as the first official state visit, even before a visit to the United States, of the new Netanyahu government; supporting King Hussein by providing him with some tangible security measures to protect his regime against Syrian subversion; encouraging — through influence in the U.S. business community — investment in Jordan to structurally shift Jordan’s economy away from dependence on Iraq; and diverting Syria’s attention by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize Syrian control of Lebanon.

Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.

King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf, Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet’s family, the direct descendants of which — and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows — is King Hussein.



http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/archive/1990s/instituteforadvancedstrategicandpoliticalstudies.htm

[Melsky]

7. This article is a must read

Rummy and pals play war. It's unbelievable that they could get away with this shit for so long.

[kskiska]

9. Salon Article on this

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

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.

Six months later, with controversy mounting over the administration's handling of war intelligence, the small, secretive cell inside the Pentagon is drawing closer scrutiny and may soon be the subject of a congressional inquiry to determine whether it manipulated and politicized key intelligence and botched planning for postwar Iraq.

"The concern is they were in the cherry-picking business -- cherry-picking half-truths and rumors and only highlighting pieces of information that bolstered the administration's case for war," says U.S. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

(snip)

…Former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro refers to the office dismissively as "the bat cave."

Thielmann is still unclear why the civilian-run office was formed. "Do they have expertise in Iraqi culture?" he asks. "Are they missile experts? Nuclear engineers? There's no logical explanation for the office's creation except that they wanted people to find evidence to support their answers ."

more…
http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/16/intelligence/index.html

[Romey]

11. Robert Dreyfuss wrote a piece on this back in Dec '02

The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA

Devising Bad Intelligence to Promote Bad Policy

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/12.06E.pentagon.cia.htm

Two intriguing parts to this article regarding this group's sub-contracting - Chalabi's INC was actually given a BUDGET by the State Dept.!

Earlier this year, the State Department abruptly stopped funding an INC scheme to collect intelligence inside Iraq. "The INC could only account for $2.5 million out of $4.5 million they received for the program," says a State Department official. "I can't say that there was evidence of corruption or embezzlement, but $2 million was unaccounted for."

I especially liked this part ...

Adds Cannistraro, "They're willing to twist information in order to serve that interest. They've opened up a channel at the Pentagon to collect intelligence from Iraqi exiles, using people off the books, contractors. It's getting pretty close to an Iran-Contra type of situation."

The other intriguing part is this associate of Perle's -

According to informed sources, Perle, who's currently based at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has for the past several years sponsored the work of a former CIA clandestine operative, Reuel Marc Gerecht, helping him financially, lending him the use of his villa in France to write a book and getting him a fellowship at AEI. Gerecht, who spends much of his time living in Brussels, maintains close ties to the INC via its centers in London and Washington. According to a person familiar with the arrangement, Gerecht is privately working with the INC's intelligence people to help funnel information to Feith's office in the Pentagon.

[newyawker99]

18. Hi Romey!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[JHB]

12. It's Deja Vu all over again...

Intelligence analysis by outside consultants (who happen to be conservative hawks)? It's "Team B" all over again! (really not a surprise: Wolfowitz is a Team B alumnus).

http://intellit.muskingum.edu/analysis_folder/analysissovteams.html
The exercise in competitive analysis that involved the pitting of Team A (CIA analysts) against Team B (outside experts) on the National Intelligence Estimate on Soviet Strategic Objectives (NIE 11-3/8) was commissioned by DCI George Bush in 1976. (Actually, there were three B-teams, but the teams on Soviet missile accuracy and air defense did not engender the controversy associated with the strategic objectives team.) The exercise, its results, and its long-term value remain controversial.
The Team B leader was Prof. Richard Pipes. Associates were Prof. William Van Cleave; Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, USA (Ret.); Dr. Thomas Wolfe, RAND Corporation; and Gen. John Vogt, USAF, (Ret.). The Team's Advisory Panel was comprised of Ambassador Foy Kohler; The Honorable Paul Nitze; Ambassador Seymour Weiss; Maj. Gen. Jasper Welch, USAF; and Dr. Paul Wolfowitz, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on Intelligence. Subcommittee on Collection, Production, & Quality. The National Intelligence Estimates A-B Team Episode Concerning Soviet Strategic Capability & Objectives. 95th Cong., 2d sess., 1978. Committee Print.

The media controversy and charges of politicization of the estimative process that began even before the Team A/Team B NIE was completed in December 1976 led the relatively new Senate Select Committee in Intelligence to initiate an inquiry into the affair. The unclassified version of the committee's report, released in February 1978, supports competitive analysis as a concept, but finds flaws in the composition -- that is, the political views or biases -- of Team B.

Read that as: Wolfy and others (Pearle is mixed up in this too, at the congressional end) leaked "Team B"'s strategic assessments to the budding hounds on the right, and they used this to justify Reagan's arms bulidup. However, with the prespective of history, we now know that they pretty much got it completely wrong, and instead of the Soviets being ten feet tall, they were a sick bear that would get progressively more diseased and ineffectual until it collapsed altogether.

But, delayed failure is the road to success, especially for CEOs and political soothsayers, so they've failed their way to the top.
:argh:

[Mari333]

13. More on these people

http://www.rense.com/general37/theweirdmenbehind.htm

[Stephanie]

17. More PNAC background here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=110&topic_id=80&mesg_id=80&page=">PNAC Links Archive

[ima_sinnic]

19. oh man--just went 404--DID ANYBODY SAVE A COPY?

I've got a small part of it copied, I was just adding it to my web site

on edit: ok, it's back now--but changed?