Thursday, February 05, 2004

The Bush administration is staging a tactical  retreat on the issue of its pre-war claims about  Iraq's weapons. Unable to continue defending those assertions -- crucial to his case for war -- the president has declared he will form a commission to "analyze where we stand, what we can do better as we fight this war against terror." That panel might want to review Robert Dreyfuss' report in the January/February issue of Mother Jones before starting its work. While the White House wants the review to focus on "intelligence shortcomings," Dreyfuss shows that the misinformation about Iraq and the threat it posed were no accident. Rather, they were the product of a Pentagon office set up to massage and manufacture the intelligence needed to support a war. ( The Office of Special Plans )   Allen L Roland     The Lie Factory   Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war. Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest January/February 2004 Issue / MOTHER JONES http://ga3.org/ct/9dzyf751mafJ/ It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs. So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone. Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence—it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials—including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February—that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war. Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews—some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity—exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion. Robert Dreufuss is a longtime Washington journalist and a contributing writer for Mother Jones. His last cover story for the magazine focused on the neoconservative plan ot topple Saddam Hussein and reshape the Middle East ("The Thirty-Year Itch," March/April 2003). Jason Vest is a Washington reporter whose work has appeared in the Washington Post,U.S. News & World Report, the American Prospect, and the Village Voice. Allen Roland's weblog: http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/ Website: www.allenroland.com 11:34:42 AM    comment []