corrente

Dick Cheney's loopy "loop"; manufacturing the BIG LIE.
Cast of characters include: Paul Wolfowitz, Bruce Feith, Richard Perle, Harold Rhode, the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Rubin (AEI), David Wurmser (AEI), F. Michael Maloof, Lewis Libby, Ahmad Chalabi (INC), Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, William Luti, John Bolton, Abram N. Shulsky, Colonel William Bruner, Youssef Aboul-Enein, Newt Gingrich, Francis Brooke (Rendon Group),...

This piece from the January/February 2004 Issue of Mother Jones by Jason Vest and Robert Dreyfuss, titled The Lie Factory, is a complete guide to the players and swindlers who ran the intelligence chop-shop called the Office of Special Plans.

The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a Pentagon "cell," was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser's unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids, which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA's reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted.

Read the whole article if you haven't already. On the eve of Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 Commission this report is one of the best lowdowns I've seen with respect to the whole secretive ideologically driven Pentagon based operation that sold us the deceptions and propaganda that led to the war in Iraq.

Also, from the same article, excerpted comments from others who similarly reflect Richard Clarke's recent conclusions:

Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." Indeed, that was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists.

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."

Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein.

Please read The Lie Factory

It makes for one of those moments when you just want to open a window and yell out: praise the Great Possum (or whatever) for real investigative journalism!
But you don't because, well, that would be kind of weird. And because thats what blogs are for.

PTGP (praise the great possum)

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