10.2.07

Pentagon unit ( Office of Special Plans ) defied CIA advice to justify Iraq war

As if we didn't already know this...

Their plans were so special. So special, in fact, that we are faced with a mounting defecit while people are dying at an ever higher rate... and they still can't even turn the lights on in Baghdad.
So special that throwing 20,000 more troops at this parade of violence cannot possibly make things better. They got themselves to where they are now...where we are all now. And where are these people that created the false intelligence in the lead-up to the war? Running the World Bank, fired or resigned, and trying to hide away...far away...while these many get fat on the interest of their war profiteering.
Where are Chalabi and all the other con-artists and self-deluding neocons?
And recently they passed the oil law, which completed much of the mission of the war. Now they just gotta sit and wait...and watch their crooked money come flowing in.

So special that there is a refugee crisis amounting to upwards of 3.6 million people displaced. 1.6 intra-Iraq, while approximately 2 million have fled the country.
Who is to shoulder this extremely special burden?
What special plans are they coming up with now to solve the endless problems this war has created?
I bet none.

Suzanne Goldenberg reports.
. 'Alternative' agency set up to link Saddam to al-Qaida
· Mainstream intelligence was cast aside, Senate told


Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Saturday February 10, 2007
The Guardian


An "alternative intelligence" unit operating at the Pentagon in the run-up to the war on Iraq was dedicated to establishing a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, even though the CIA was unconvinced of such a connection, the US Senate was told yesterday.

A report presented to the armed services committee by the Pentagon's inspector general, Thomas Gimble, exposes the Bush administration to new charges of manipulating intelligence to make its case for going to war against Saddam nearly four years ago.

Mr Gimble described a unit called the Office for Special Plans, authorised by then Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and overseen by the former policy chief Douglas Feith, to review raw intelligence on Iraq. The main focus of the unit was establishing a link between Saddam and al-Qaida - going against the consensus in the intelligence community that the Iraqi leader had nothing to do with the September 11 2001 terror attacks.

"The office of the under-secretary of defence for policy developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community, to senior decision-makers," the report says.

Mr Feith's office was the source for some of the most glaring examples of faulty intelligence during the run-up to the war. In 2002 it promoted the idea that there had been a meeting between the lead September 11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. The intelligence community has never established this.

To finish article

0 comments: