Don't blame the intelligence community, blame the Office of Special Plans
By Bev Conover
Online Journal Editor & Publisher
February 11, 2004âThere is a term for the lack of critical thinking that has gripped Washington, the corporate media and the people who rely on the television networks for what passes for news. It is called post hoc fallacy.
What post hoc fallacy means is that because A occurs before B, A is therefore the cause of B. For example, (A) Osama bin Laden has expressed anger over the first Gulf War and Saudi Arabia's involvement in it; (B) the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, therefore Osama must be guilty of perpetrating those attacks, even though no evidence has been provided to justify acceptance of the causal claim.
Yet, the Bush administration, Congress and the corporate media have turned this into gospel. No need to look further: Osama did it.
Another example, (A) Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator who has weapons of mass destruction; (B) Iraq and Saddam must be destroyed before those WMD are used on us, never mind that UN weapons inspectors said there is no evidence of WMD to justify an illegal preemptive strike on a sovereign nation.
Yet, Congress and the corporate media bought into the Iraq fallacies. Now both are hot to trot to buy into the Bush administration lie that the mess it has gotten us into in Iraq is the fault of the intelligence agencies, especially the CIA. This is not good governance and it is rotten journalism.
Since George W. Bush admitted he doesn't read newspapers, but relies on his "trusted" advisers to tell him what he "needs to know," is it possible they never told him about the cabal of neocons who set up shop in the Pentagon, at the direction of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and with the blessing of Vice President Dick Cheney, to second guess what the CIA, FBI and other intelligence gathering agenciesâforeign and domesticâwere saying about the situation in Iraq, in order to cook up a case for an illegal war? It is called the Office of Special Plans (OSP) and is headed by Undersecretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith.
Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, seized upon 9/11 to include war against Iraq in Bush's bogus "war on terror." And as much as the administration tried, and Bush is still trying, to link Saddam to al Qaeda, the intelligence agencies told it there was no there there. Also, as we now know from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's revelations, war against Iraq was on the agenda from practically the moment the Supreme Court installed Bush in the White House. Not to be deterred from their goal of seizing Iraq, both for its oil and the neocons long-term goal of US global dominance, Rumsfeld & Co. set up the Office of Special Plans to cherry pick the facts in making the case for war.
Following 9/11, Former House Speak Newt Gingrich suddenly became a Pentagon "consultant" and an unpaid member of the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board. Gingrich and Cheney made a number of visits to the CIA in Langley, Virginia. Gingrich, according to the Guardian in a July 17, 2000, article, "sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace."
"The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more 'forward-leaning' interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results," the Guardian reported in the same article.
The Guardian further noted, "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.'
"The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
"'None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels,' said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
"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 Perleânow an influential Pentagon figureâserved 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."
But if Bush has his way, his neocon buddies will go unpunished for their skullduggery. Instead, his dependent commission to tar and feather the intelligence agencies will blame the Iraq quagmire on intelligence failures, just as the dependent commission to whitewash Bush's complicity in 9/11 are trying to blame those attacks on intelligence failures.
Senator John McCain, whom Bush chose to sit on the "blame the intelligence agencies commission," has shown he learned his lesson about opposing Bush. McCain, painted by the Bush campaign as a POW loony when he ran against Bush for the Republic presidential nomination in 2000, last week told reporters, "The president [sic] of the United States, I believe, did not manipulate any kind of information for political gain or otherwise." Nothing like a verdict before the trial. Then again, Bush may not have manipulated the intelligence, but his chosen cohorts did. What was that President Harry Truman said, referring to the Oval Office, about the buck stopping there?
CIA Director George Tenet last week apparently followed White House instructions to only partially fall on his sword. That way he wouldn't have to resign or be fired. After all, in the wake of O'Neill's revelations in journalist Ron Suskind's book, "The Price of Loyalty" and former special adviser to the president [sic] for cybersecurity Richard Clarke's forthcoming book, which reportedly has the White House in a tizzy, Bush surely wants to avoid the prospect of Tenet writing another tell-all book that comes out before the Nov. 2 election.
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