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Foj
Citizen
Username: Foger
Post Number: 1291
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Saturday, May 6, 2006 - 10:45 pm: | 
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Just to set the stage:
May 2001 - The U.S. State Department met with Iran, German and Italian officials to discuss Afghanistan. It was decided that the ruling Taliban would be toppled and a "broad-based government" would control the country so a gas pipeline could be built there.
http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/7969.pdf .
http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/features/fex20867.htm
MARCH 2001 - Cheney closely guarded the details surrounding his energy task force but documents released through the Freedom of Information Act reveal a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.”
http://www.judicialwatch.org/071703.c_.shtml
As one internet poster pointed out:
"The Iraq map is not a map, it's a plan
"There are several areas marked 'earmarked for production sharing' (look at the map
legend), which means privatized oil fields. Iraq did not have privatized oil fields and
production sharing agreements before the US took it over.
"There are also parcels marked on the Iraq oil field and exploration map (numbered
'Block 1' through '9'). Iraq did not have an active, privatized oil exploration program
going on before it was conquered by the US.
"If you read the footnotes and entire contents of the other documents, there is a heavy
emphasis on business concerns, such as contracts and vendors over items one might
think would be more important in a government discussion, such as capacity, long term
reserves, etc...
"One footnote (in UAEOilProj.pdf) even contains investment advice for the participants
at the meeting, suggesting opportunities in downstream projects, such as power
desalination and pipeline projects.
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Now to the Office of Special Plans, for those who dont pay attention:
The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was a secret group of analysts and policy advisors with no status in the intelligence community. Nevertheless they reported directly to the White House and National Security office with cherry-picked intelligence from questionable sources to support the case for invading Iraq. The OSP circumvented formal, well-established oversight procedures, ignored intelligence that didn't further their agenda, expanded the intelligence on weapons beyond what was justified and over-emphasized the national security risk. They became more influential than the C.I.A. or the
Defense Intelligence Agency who didn't even know the ultra-secret OSP existed for at least a year.
Because they were based in the Pentagon, it was assumed that the OSP was an intelligence-gathering agency that was second-guessing the C.I.A. but in actuality it was the White House Military Marketing Machine charged with the task of writing the PNAC's "Get Saddam" sales pitch for the public. Shading and bending reality to suit their own purpose, it wasn't important for the OSP's stories about Saddam to be factual, only that the average American believed them to be - in true Hollywood fashion.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact
......exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq.......
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html
September 2002 Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, adamant hawks, rename the Northern Gulf Affairs Office on the Pentagon’s fourth floor (in the seventh corridor of D Ring) the “Office of Special Plans” (OSP) and increase its four-person staff to sixteen. [New Yorker, 6/12/2003; Los Angeles Times, 12/24/2002; Inter Press Service, 9/7/2003; Tom Paine (.com), 9/27/2003; American Conservative, 1/1/2004; Knight Ridder, 9/16/2002; Mother Jones, 2/2004 Sources: Unnamed administration official, Karen Kwiatkowski, Greg Thielmann] William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Vice President Cheney, is put in charge of the day-to-day operations. [Guardian, 8/17/2003; Mother Jones, 2/2004] The Office of Special Plans is staffed with a tight group of like-minded neoconservative ideologues, who are known advocates of regime change in Iraq. Notably, the staffers have little background in intelligence or Iraqi history and culture. [Salon, 8/16/2003; Inter Press Service, 9/7/2003; American Conservative, 1/1/2004; Mother Jones, 2/2004 Sources: Karen Kwiatkowski, Greg Thielmann, A Pentagon adviser] Some of the people associated with this office were earlier involved with the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, also known as the “Wurmser-Maloof” project (see Shortly after September 11, 2001). They hire “scores of temporary ‘consultants’ ... including like-minded lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing think-tanks in the US capital.” Neoconservative ideologues, like Richard Perle and Newt Gingrich, are afforded direct input into the Office of Special Plans. [Guardian, 8/17/2003; Mother Jones, 2/2004] The office works alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau, also under the authority of Douglas Feith [Inter Press Service, 9/7/2003; Mother Jones, 2/2004 Sources: Karen Kwiatkowski] The official business of Special Plans is to help plan for post-Saddam Iraq. The office’s staff members presumably “develop defense policies aimed at building an international coalition, prepare the secretary of defense and his top deputies for interagency meetings, coordinate troop-deployment orders, craft policies for dealing with prisoners of war and illegal combatants, postwar assistance and reconstruction policy planning, postwar governance, Iraqi oil infrastructure policy, postwar Iraqi property disputes, war crimes and atrocities, war-plan review and, in their spare time, prepare congressional testimony for their principals.” [Insight, 1/2/2004] But according to numerous well-placed sources, the office becomes a source for many of the administration’s prewar allegations against Iraq. It is accused of exaggerating, politicizing, and misrepresenting intelligence, which is “stovepiped” to top administration officials who use the intelligence in their policy decisions on Iraq. [Los Angeles Times, 12/24/2002; New Yorker, 6/12/2003; Inter Press Service, 9/7/2003; American Conservative, 1/1/2004; Tom Paine (.com), 9/27/2003; Knight Ridder, 9/16/2002; Mother Jones, 2/2004; Daily Telegraph, 8/11/2004; CNN, 8/11/2004 Sources: Unnamed administration official, Karen Kwiatkowski, Greg Thielmann] There are very few news reports in the American mainstream media that report on the office. In fact, the office is reportedly Top Secret. [Bamford, 2004] “We were instructed at a staff meeting that this office was not to be discussed or explained,” OSP staffer Karen Kwiatkowski will later say, “and if people in the Joint Staff, among others, asked, we were to offer no comment.” [American Conservative, 1/1/2004] Colin Powell is said to have felt that Cheney and the neoconservatives in this “Gestapo” office had established what was essentially a separate government. [Washington Post, 5/17/2004 Sources: Top officials interviewed by Washington Post editor Bob Woodward] Among the claims critics find most troubling about the office are:
The office relies heavily on accounts from Iraqi exiles and defectors associated with Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC), long considered suspect by other US intelligence agencies. [Mother Jones, 2/2004; New Yorker, 6/12/2003; Inter Press Service, 9/7/2003; Guardian, 8/17/2003; Salon, 8/16/2003; Independent, 10/30/2003 Sources: Greg Thielmann, Unnamed administration official] One defector in particular, code-named “Curveball,” provides as much as 98 percent of the intelligence on Iraq’s alleged arsenal of biological weapons. [CNN, 8/11/2004] Much of the information provided by the INC’s sources consists of “misleading and often faked intelligence reports,” which often flow to Special Plans and NESA directly, “sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service and sometimes through the INC’s own US-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon.” [Mother Jones, 2/2004] According to Karen Kwiatkowski, the movement of intelligence from the INC to the Office of Special Plans is facilitated by Colonel Bruner, a former military aide to Gingrich. [Newsweek, 1/15/2004; Mother Jones, 2/2004; Salon, 4/10/2004 Sources: Memo, Karen Kwiatkowski] Bruner “was Chalabi’s handler,” Kwiatkowski will tell Mother Jones. “He would arrange meetings with Chalabi and Chalabi’s folks.” [Mother Jones, 2/2004 Sources: Karen Kwiatkowski]
The Office of Special Plans purposefully ignores intelligence that undermines the case for war while exaggerating any leads that support it. “It wasn’t intelligence,—it was propaganda,” Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked at the NESA desk, will later explain. “They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together.” [New Yorker, 6/12/2003; New York Times, 11/24/2002; Guardian, 8/17/2003; Inter Press Service, 9/7/2003; Salon, 8/16/2003; Independent, 10/30/2003; Mother Jones, 2/2004 Sources: Unnamed former intelligence official, Greg Thielmann, Ellen Tauscher]
The OSP bypasses established oversight procedures by sending its intelligence assessments directly to the White House and National Security Council without having them first vetted by a review process involving other US intelligence agencies. [Mother Jones, 2/2004; Salon, 8/16/2003; Guardian, 8/17/2003; New Yorker, 6/12/2003 Sources: Unnamed senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war, David Obey, Greg Thielmann] The people at Special Plans are so successful at bypassing conventional procedures, in part, because their neoconservative colleagues hold key positions in several other agencies and offices. Their contacts in other agencies include: John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International; Bolton’s advisor, David Wurmser, a former research fellow on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute, who was just recently working in a secret Pentagon planning unit at Douglas Feith’s office (see Shortly after September 11, 2001); Elizabeth Cheney, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs; Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser; Elliott Abrams, The National Security Council’s top Middle East aide; and Richard Perle, Newt Gingrich, James Woolsey and Kenneth Adelman of the Defense Policy Board. The office provides very little information about its work to other US intelligence offices. [Guardian, 8/17/2003; Salon, 8/16/2003; Inter Press Service, 9/7/2003 Sources: David Obey, Greg Thielmann, Karen Kwiatkowski, Unnamed An unnamed senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war]
Lastly, the people involved in Special Plans openly exhibit strong pro-Israel and anti-Arab bias. The problem, note critics, is that the analysis of intelligence is supposed to be apolitical and untainted by ideological viewpoints. [American Conservative, 1/1/2004 Sources: Karen Kwiatkowski] According to a CIA intelligence official and four members of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, Special Plans is the group responsible for the claim Bush will make in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from an African country (see 9:01 pm January 28, 2003). [Information Clearing House, 8/16/2003; Nation, 7/19/2003] After the existence of the Office of Special Plans is revealed to the public, the Pentagon will deny that it served as a direct conduit to the White House for misleading intelligence, instead claiming that its activities had been limited to postwar plans for Iraq. [New Yorker, 6/12/2003] And a December 2003 opinion piece published in Insight magazine will call the allegations surrounding the Office of Special Plans the work of conspiracy theorists. [Insight, 1/2/2004]
People and organizations involved:
Colonel Bruner, Colin Powell, James Woolsey, Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, David Wurmser, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Karen Kwiatkowski, Paul Wolfowitz, Abram Shulsky, Elizabeth Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Kenneth Adelman
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_timeline_of_th e_2003_invasion_of_iraq&general_topic_areas=officeOfSpecialPlans
"Karen Kwiatkowski, is a retired lieutenant colonel formerly assigned to the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon. In her extraordinary 5,500-word account, Kwiatkowski writes: "I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies. I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to the Congress. I observed how the distorted intelligence and sharpened political talking points were funneled to the Office of Vice President Cheney."
http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp/index.html
If Special Plans was going to search for new intelligence on Iraq, the most obvious source was defectors with firsthand knowledge. The office inevitably turned to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Special Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the I.N.C. to officials in the White House.
There was a close personal bond, too, between Chalabi and Wolfowitz and Perle, dating back many years. Their relationship deepened after the Bush Administration took office, and Chalabi’s ties extended to others in the Administration, including Rumsfeld; Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; and I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. For years, Chalabi has had the support of prominent members of the American Enterprise Institute and other conservatives.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0506-06.htm
Heres a chart showing the people connected to the Office of Special Plans:
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/04/27/politics/20040428_INTE_GRAPH.gif
Pentagon officials sought to minimize the significance of any sensitive information the suspect individual may have wrongfully passed. "The Defense Department has been cooperating with the Justice Department on this matter for an extended period of time," the Pentagon said in a statement issued last night. "The investigation involves a single individual at DOD at the desk officer level, who was not in a position to have significant influence over U.S. policy. Nor could a foreign power be in a position to influence U.S. policy through this individual. To the best of DOD's knowledge, the investigation does not target any other DOD individuals."
Even so, the case is likely to attract intense attention because the official being investigated works under William J. Luti, deputy under secretary of Defense for Near East and South Asian Affairs. Luti oversaw the Pentagon's "Office of Special Plans," which conducted some of the early policy work for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Some critics of the Bush administration have accused that office of distorting intelligence about Iraq in order to improve the case for going to war by arguing that Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda were much more closely linked than the intelligence community believed.
Luti reports to Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, who in turn reports to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40004-2004Aug27.html
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Foj
Citizen
Username: Foger
Post Number: 1294
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Saturday, May 6, 2006 - 11:24 pm: |
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A Democratic U.S. Senator on Thursday accused a senior Pentagon official of distorting intelligence information to back claims of links between Iraq and al Qaeda before last year's U.S.-led invasion.
A report issued by Sen. Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, questioned assertions of pre-war links between Baghdad and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Since the invasion, al-Zarqawi has emerged as a leader in the anti-U.S. insurgency.
The report, compiled by the committee's Democratic staff, criticized the Office of Special Plans, which operated under the auspices of Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.<
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/21/congress.intelligence.dc.reut/index.ht ml
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=6576319
Then of course the ubitiquos DSM:
http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/index.html
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Foj
Citizen
Username: Foger
Post Number: 1299
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, May 7, 2006 - 9:07 pm: |
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Shorthand-- The Bush Regime went to war on the wings of a lie. |
joel dranove
Citizen
Username: Jdranove
Post Number: 459
Registered: 1-2006
| | Posted on Sunday, May 7, 2006 - 9:32 pm: |
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IF this was true, the NY Times and MSM would be all over it.
jd |
Foj
Citizen
Username: Foger
Post Number: 1302
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, May 7, 2006 - 10:45 pm: |
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Yeah you are right, since CNN, NY Times & Rueters didnt cover it it didnt happen............
LOL, ROFL slappin my thigh, your sense of humor is great, I thought I was reading a post from GOP man. OMG !! ! ! |
notehead
Supporter
Username: Notehead
Post Number: 3241
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, May 8, 2006 - 2:13 pm: |
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And if the NYT did devote a lot of page space to it, then it couldn't be true because the WSJ didn't cover it. And if the WSJ did cover it, then it couldn't be true because it didn't get covered by Faux News, etc... |
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