- WASHINGTON - An ad hoc office
under US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith appears to
have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative
political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to
lead the push for war against Iraq.
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- The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside
the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally
created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official US intelligence
agencies for connections between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
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- Retired intelligence officials from the State Department,
the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated
intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
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- But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were
part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists
who worked with other George W Bush political appointees scattered around
the national security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according
to retired Lieutenant-Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA
from May 2002 through February 2003...
- The heads of NESA and OSP were Deputy Undersecretary
William Luti and Abram Shulsky, respectively.
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- Other appointees who worked with them in both offices
included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative
American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an
expert on neo-conservative icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother
of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of
the pro-Likud Jerusalem Post; and Chris Lehman, the brother of the John
Lehman, a prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of the navy
under former president Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski.
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- Along with Feith, all of the political appointees have
in common a close identification with the views of the right-wing Likud
Party in Israel. Feith, whose law partner is a spokesman for the settlement
movement in Israel, has long been a fierce opponent of the Oslo peace process,
while WINEP has acted as the think tank for the most powerful pro-Israel
lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),
which generally follows a Likud line.
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- Also like Feith, several of the appointees were proteges
of Richard Perle, an AEI fellow who doubled as chairman until last April
of Rumsfeld's unpaid Defense Policy Board (DPB), whose members were appointed
by Feith, and also had an office in the Pentagon one floor below the NESA
offices.
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- Similarly, Luti, a retired naval officer, was a protege
of another DPB board member also based at AEI, former Republican Speaker
of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich. Luti in turn hired retired
Colonel William Bruner, a former Gingrich staffer, and Chris Straub, a
retired lieutenant-colonel, anti-abortion activist, and former staffer
on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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- Also working for Luti was another naval officer, Yousef
Aboul-Enein, whose main job was to pore over Arabic-language newspapers
and CIA transcripts of radio broadcasts to find evidence of ties between
al-Qaeda and Saddam that may have been overlooked by the intelligence agencies,
and a DIA officer named John Trigilio.
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- Through Feith, both offices worked closely with Perle,
Gingrich and two other DPB members and major war boosters - former CIA
director James Woolsey and Kenneth Adelman - in ensuring that the "intelligence"
that they developed reached a wide public audience outside the bureaucracy.
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- They also debriefed "defectors" handled by
the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an opposition umbrella group headed
by Ahmed Chalabi, a long-time friend of Perle, whom the intelligence agencies
generally wrote off as an unreliable self-promoter.
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- "They would draw up 'talking points' they would
use and distribute to their friends," said Kwiatkowski. "But
the talking points would be changed continually, not because of new intel
[intelligence], but because the press was poking holes in what was in the
memos."
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- The offices fed information directly and indirectly to
sympathetic media outlets, including the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard
and FoxNews Network, as well as the editorial pages of the Wall Street
Journal and syndicated columnists, such as Charles Krauthammer.
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- In inter-agency discussions, Feith and the two offices
communicated almost exclusively with like-minded allies in other agencies,
rather than with their official counterparts, including even the DIA in
the Pentagon, according to Kwiatkowski.
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- Rather than working with the State Department's Bureau
of Intelligence and Research, its Near Eastern Affairs bureau, or even
its Iraq desk, for example, they preferred to work through Undersecretary
of State for Arms Control and International Security (and former AEI executive
vice president) John Bolton; Michael Wurmser (another Perle protege at
AEI who staffed the predecessor to OSP); and Deputy Assistant Secretary
of State for Near East Affairs, Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of the Vice
President Dick Cheney.
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- At the National Security Council (NSC), they communicated
mainly with Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, until
Elliott Abrams, a dyed-in-the-wool neo-conservative with close ties to
Feith and Perle, was appointed last December as the NSC's top Middle East
aide.
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- "They worked really hard for Abrams; he was a necessary
link," Kwiatkowski told Inter Press Service on Wednesday. "The
day he got [the appointment], they were whooping and hollering, 'We got
him in, we got him in'."
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- They rarely communicated directly with the CIA, leaving
that to political heavyweights, including Gingrich, who is reported to
have made several trips to the CIA headquarters, and, more importantly,
I Lewis "Scooter" Lilly, Dick Cheney's chief of staff and national
security adviser.
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- According to recent published reports, CIA analysts felt
these visits were designed to put pressure on them to tailor their analyses
more to the liking of administration hawks.
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- In some cases, NESA and OSP even prepared memos specifically
for Cheney and Libby, something unheard of in previous administrations
because the lines of authority in the vice president's office and the Pentagon
are entirely separate. "Luti sometimes would say, 'I've got to do
this for Scooter'," said Kwiatkowski. "It looked like Cheney's
office was pulling the strings."
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- Kwiatkowski said that she could not confirm published
reports that OSP worked with a similar ad hoc group in Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's office. But she recounts one incident in which she helped
escort a group of half a dozen Israelis, including several generals, from
the first floor reception area to Feith's office. "We just followed
them, because they knew exactly where they were going and moving fast."
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- When the group arrived, she noted the book which all
visitors are required to sign under special regulations that took effect
after the September 11, 2001. "I asked his secretary, 'Do you want
these guys to sign in'? She said, 'No, these guys don't have to sign in'."
It occurred to her, she said, that the office may have deliberately not
wanted to maintain a record of the meeting.
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- She added that OSP and MESA personnel were already discussing
the possibility of "going after Iran" after the war in Iraq last
January and that articles by Michael Ledeen, another AEI fellow and Perle
associate who has been calling for the US to work for "regime change"
in Tehran since late 2001, were given much attention in the two offices.
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- Ledeen and Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, recently
created the Coalition for Democracy in Iran to lobby for a more aggressive
policy there. Their move coincided with suggestions by Sharon that Washington
adopt a more confrontational policy vis-a-vis Tehran.
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- Iran recently said it was prepared to turn over five
senior al-Qaeda figures, including the son of Osama bin Laden, who are
currently in its custody if Washington permanently shuts down an Iraqi-based
Iranian rebel group that is listed as a terrorist organization by the State
Department.
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- Pentagon officials, particularly Feith's office, have
reportedly opposed the deal, which had been favored by the State Department,
because of the possibility that the group, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, might
be useful in putting pressure on Tehran.
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- (Inter Press Service)
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