Designed Intelligence

In response to Bush's attempt at mass deception with his speech in Pennsylvania yesterday, people have pointed out some of the glaring lies it included.  Robb-Silverman explicitly stated that they did not examine into the manipulation of intelligence before the war. As Atrios makes clear, the intelligence that the Congress receives is not the same as what the President gets.  If only a competent Senator had seen the August 8th Presidential Daily Briefing, I might still be able to see the World Trade Center from my window. And a lot of people would still be alive.

In refuting Bush's outrageous claims, we have to remember that this administration was not in fact satisfied with the intelligence it was getting about Saddam. So it created a new intelligence agency and created new intelligence.

The Pentagon already had it's own Defense Intelligence Agency. And the Administration also had the C.I.A. But when they did not get the intelligence it wanted, they made a new one. The Office of Special Plans was created within the Defense Department in September of 2002.  Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's Deputy Secr'try of Defense, chose Doug Feith to lead it.

Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Feith, and Chalabi had been buddies for years. They had all agreed that Saddam's removal was essential for more than a decade before September 11. In their estimation, it was necessary to the security of Israel, as well as to the personal ambitions of them all, but especially Chalabi. A lot of this group had served in George H.W. Bush's administration. Their interrelationships are amazing.

Feith's father,  Dalck Feith, was a "freedom fighter"  (or terrorist?) for Zionists trying to violently drive the British out of Palestine.  Douglas Feith  was passionately pro-Israel. He was against the Oslo accords, the Wye agreement and Hebron. He was a co-founder of One Jerusalem, an organization that has done a lot to promote the unholy marriage of Christian Fundamentalism and Right Wing Zionism.

The Office of Special Plans that he set up in the Pentagon, was special. In the New Yorker of May 12, 2003 Sy Hersh wrote quoted a Pentagon official that "Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed too be true-that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had chemical, biological and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region, and potentially even the U.S." And it did what it was created to do.

One of the Office's main sources was Chalabi. He's pretty impressive. Most know of the many millions that he stole from Jordan, of the many millions which the U.S. paid his Iraq National Congress, and of the accusation that he spied for Iran. But a small example of his talent is pointed out by Hirsch in the same article. An "honest" defector was going to be debriefed by an agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Seeing nothing to be gained by honest testimony to that agency, Chalabi offered to supply the translator. The agency was informed that the defector was explaining how he had been trained by Al Qaeda in Iraq on using chemical and biological weapons.  The problem was that he said no such thing. Chalabi's "interpreter" had made the whole thing up.

For Bush to say that his team did not manipulate intelligence is only true in the most narrow sense of the word. In fact, they simply made it up. It was not honest intelligence that led us into war, it was carefully designed intelligence.  Which is yet another reason intelligent design should not be taught in American schools.

Comments

[Rick]

From a novel you are working on?

[bbbustard]

Unfortunately, it's not from a novel. The fiction writers are in this administration. You weren't real specific about which points you find unbeleivable, so I start with showing the source for my first point:Silberman-Robb Commission Report, 3/31/05: "[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community. Accordingly, while we interviewed a host of current and former policymakers during the course of our investigation, the purpose of those interviews was to learn about how the Intelligence Community reached and communicated its judgments about Iraq's weapons programs--not to review how policymakers subsequently used that information."
http:www.wmd.gov/report/report.html
If you need any additional facts on other points, just let me know