The Pentagon's War Machine: CIA Probe Points to the Office of Special Plans

Editor's Note: The Public Record is digging into its archives and republishing investigative stories about Iraq's non-existent weapons program and how assertions that Iraq was an imminent threat was based on dubious intelligence and outright lies. These articles, some of which were published as far back as 2002, were written by Jason Leopold, one of a handful of reporters who reported critically on the Bush administration's prewar intelligence months before the March 2003 invasion. On Thursday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its long-awaited report on prewar Iraq intelligence. Its findings are damning. The report says President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney knowingly lied to Congress and the public about Iraq's weapons cache and the country's ties to al-Qaeda.

By Jason Leopold, July 26, 2003 Counterpunch.org

A half-dozen former CIA agents investigating prewar intelligence have found that a secret Pentagon committee, set up by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001, manipulated reams of intelligence information prepared by the spy agency on the so-called Iraqi threat and then delivered it to top White House officials who used it to win support for a war in Iraq.

The former CIA agents were asked to examine prewar intelligence last year by CIA Director George Tenet and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. They will present a final report to the Pentagon and CIA and possibly Congressional and Senate commitees later this year.

The ad-hoc committee, called the Office of Special Plans, headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and other Pentagon hawks, described the worst-case scenarios in terms of Iraq's alleged stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and claimed the country was close to acquiring nuclear weapons, according to four of the CIA agents, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the information is still classified, who conducted a preliminary view of the intelligence.

The agents said the Office of Special Plans is responsible for providing the National Security Council and Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Rumsfeld with a bulk of the intelligence information on Iraq's weapons program that turned out to be wrong. But White House officials used the information it received from the Office of Special Plans to win support from the public and Congress to start a war in Iraq even though the White House knew much of the information was dubious, the CIA agents said.