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Template:Wikify-date The Office of Special Plans, which existed from September, 2002, to June, 2003, was a Pentagon unit created by Donald Rumsfeld and led by Douglas Feith, dealing with intelligence on Iraq.

In an interview with the Scottish Sunday Herald, former CIA officer Larry C. Johnson said the OSP was "dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace. lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated." (Mackay, 2003)

Seymour Hersh writes that, according to an unnamed Pentagon adviser, " 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. '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.'” (Hersh, 2003)

These allegations are supported by an annexe to the first part of Senate intelligence committee's Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq published in July 2004. The review, which was highly critical of the CIA's Iraq intelligence generally but found its judgments were right on the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, suggests that the OSP, if connected to an "Iraqi intelligence cell" also headed by Douglas Feith which is described in the annexe, sought to discredit and cast doubt on CIA analysis in an effort to establish a connection between Saddam Hussein and terrorism. In one instance, in response to a cautious CIA report, "Iraq and al-Qa'eda: A Murky Relationship", the annexe relates that "one of the individuals working for the stated that the June report, '...should be read for content only - and CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored.'" (Report, 2004)

In another instance, an "Iraqi intelligence cell" briefing to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in August 2002 condemned the CIA's intelligence assessment techniques and denounced the CIA's "consistent underestimation" of matters dealing with the alleged Iraq-al Qaeda co-operation. In September 2002, two days before the CIA's final assessment of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, Feith briefed senior advisers to Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, undercutting the CIA's credibility and alleging "fundamental problems" with CIA intelligence-gathering. As reported in the conservative British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, "Senator Jay Rockefeller, senior Democrat on the committee, said that Mr Feith's cell may even have undertaken 'unlawful' intelligence-gathering initiatives." (Coman, 2004)

Journalist Larisa Alexandrovna of The Raw Story reported in 2006 that the OSP "deployed several extra-legal and unapproved task force missions" in Iraq both before and after the beginning of combat. The teams operated independently of other special forces operations, occasionally causing confusion on the battlefield. The teams appear to have had a political rather than military mission; specifically, to find Iraqi intelligence officers willing come up with evidence of WMD in Iraq whether or not such weapons actually existed:

"They come in the summer of 2003, bringing in Iraqis, interviewing them," said. "Then they start talking about WMD and they say to that 'Our President is in trouble. He went to war saying there are WMD and there are no WMD. What can we do? Can you help us?'"

According to the UN source, the intelligence officers did not cooperate with the OSP forces because they were aware that forged WMD evidence "would not pass the smell test and could be shown to be not of Iraqi origin and not using Iraqi methodology."

Larry Franklin, an analyst and Iran expert in the Feith office, has been charged with espionage, as part of a larger FBI investigation (see AIPAC espionage scandal). Douglas Feith's role is also being investigated. Allegations have also been made that Pentagon employees in the Feith office have been involved in plans for overthrowing the governments of Iran and Syria.

See also

• Operation Rockingham
• Karen Kwiatkowski

References

• Coman, Julian (July 11, 2004). Fury over Pentagon cell that briefed White House on Iraq's 'imaginary' al-Qaeda links. news.telegraph.co.uk. (registration required for full article)
• Hersh, Seymour M. (May 5, 2003). Selective Intelligence. Newyorker.com.
• Mackay, Neil (June 8, 2003). Revealed: The secret cabal which spun for Blair. sundayherald online. (also about the British Operation Rockingham)
• Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. (July 9, 2004). United States Select Senate Committee on Intelligence.

External links

• Kooper, Marc. Soldier for the truth. LA Weekly reprinted at AlterNet (February 25, 2004).
• Kwiatkowski, Karen (March 10, 2004). The New Pentagon Papers. salon.com.
• Office of Special Plans. Disinfopedia.
• Jim Lobe on OSP and wider neo-con network

• The Lie Factory article by Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest in Mother Jones
• Agents of Influence, by Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation (September 2004)
• Detailed timeline of the Office of Special Plans - Center for Cooperative Research

• 2003 Iraq conflict
• Causes and prelude of the 2003 Iraq conflict
• George W. Bush administration controversies