From Salon, 7/16/03:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/16/intelligence/index_np.html
Rumsfeld's personal spy ring
The defense secretary couldn't count on the CIA or the State
Department to provide a pretext for war in Iraq.
So he created a new agency that would tell him what he wanted to hear.
By Eric Boehlert
During last fall's feverish ramp up to war with Iraq, the Pentagon
created an unusual in-house shop to monitor Saddam Hussein's links
with terrorists and his allegedly sprawling arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction.
With direct access to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office
and the White House, the influential group helped lay out, both to
administration officials and to the press, an array of chilling,
almost too-good-to-be-true examples of why Saddam posed an immediate
threat to America.
Six months later, with controversy mounting over the administration's
handling of war intelligence, the small, secretive cell inside the
Pentagon is drawing closer scrutiny and may soon be the subject of a
congressional inquiry to determine whether it manipulated and
politicized key intelligence and botched planning for post-war Iraq.
"The concern is they were in the cherry-picking business," says U.S.
Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services
Committee.
"Cherry-picking half-truths and rumors and only highlighting pieces of
information that bolstered the administration's case for war."
The Pentagon's innocuously named Office of Special Plans served as a
unique, hand-picked group of hawkish defense officials who worked
outside regular intelligence channels.
According to the Department of Defense, the group was first created in
the aftermath of Sept. 11 to supplement the war on terrorism; it was
designed to sift through all the intelligence on terrorist activity,
and to focus particularly on various al-Qaida links.
By last fall it was focusing almost exclusively on Iraq, and often
leaking doomsday findings about Saddam's regime.
Those controversial conclusions are now fueling the suspicion the
obscure agency, propelled by ideology, manipulated key findings in
order to fit the White House's desire to wage war with Iraq.
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Sounds like Ollie North was an amateur compared to these guys.
Harry
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