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Office of Special Plans

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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 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)

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) 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.

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