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Revision as of 14:25, 10 July 2004 by Pir (talk | contribs) (Seymore Hersh)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)The Office of Special Plans is a Pentagon unit created by Donald Rumsfeld dealing with intelligence on Iraq. In July of 2003 it was renamed to Northern Gulf Affairs Office.
In an interview with the Scottish Sunday Herald, former CIA officer Larry Johnson describes 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."
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.”
see also: Operation Rockingham