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Dear all, FYI: 1) Real Special: Office of Special Plans Behind Phony 'Intelligence' 2) SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE (by Seymour Hirsch) 3) Rumsfeld cible la France et l'Allemagne (Rumsfeld targets France and Germany) [More on the black ops/propaganda unit "Office of Special Plans"] >From the intro: "Pour balayer les objections de leurs alliés, les États-Unis ont décidé d'entreprendre de vastes campagnes de propagande en Europe en corrompant journalistes et écrivains. Ces opérations ne visent pas seulement à conquérir le consentement des opinions publiques à la politique impériale de Washington, elles ont aussi pour but d'éliminer les dirigeants politiques, les entreprises et les intellectuels qui s'opposent à elle. À la mi-décembre, Donald Rumsfeld a désigné la France et l'Allemagne comme cibles prioritaires." = "In order to sweep away the objections of their allies the United States have decided to launch far reaching propaganda campaigns in Europe by corrupting journalists and writers. These operations are not only aiming at conquering the consent of the public opinion to the imperial politics of Washington, their objective is also to eliminate those political leaders, enterprises and intellectuals who oppose those politics. In mid-December [2002] Donald Rumsfeld designated France and Germany as priority targets." BTW: For his role in the war against Iraq Donald Rumsfeld has meanwhile been disinherited by the German branch of his family which strongly opposed the war. (that's true) Best Andreas =============== 1) http://www.antiwar.com/orig/leopold11.html Real Special: Office of Special Plans Behind Phony 'Intelligence' by Jason Leopold July 19, 2003 When George Tenet, the director of the CIA, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about dubious intelligence data on the Iraqi threat that made it into President Bush’s State of the Union address in January, he said an ad-hoc committee called the Office of Special Plans, set up Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and other high-profile hawks rewrote the intelligence information on Iraq that the CIA gathered and gave it to White House officials to help Bush build a case for war, according to three Senators on the intelligence committee. Tenet told the Intelligence Committee that his own spies at the CIA determined that much of the intelligence information they collected on Iraq could not prove that the country was an imminent threat nor could they find any concrete evidence that Iraq was stockpiling a cache of chemical and biological weapons. But the Office of Special Plans, using Iraqi defectors from the Iraqi National Congress as their main source, rewrote some of the CIA’s intelligence to say, undeniably, that Iraq was hiding some of the world’s most lethal weapons. Once the intelligence was rewritten, it was delivered to the office of National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, where it found its way into various public speeches given by Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, the Senators said. Moreover, these Senators allege that the office of the Vice President and the National Security Council were fully aware that the intelligence Wolfowitz’s committee collected may not have been reliable. The Senators said they are discussing privately whether to ask Wolfowitz to testify before a Senate hearing in the near future to determine how large of a role his Special Plans committee played in providing the President with intelligence data on Iraq and whether that information was reliable or beefed up to help build a case for war. A week ago, Tenet claimed responsibilty for allowing the White House to use the now disputed claim that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger to build an atomic bomb in Bush's State of the Union address. Last week, these Senators and a CIA intelligence official said the Office of Special Plans urged the White House to use the uranium claim in Bush's speech. But Democrats in the Senate are now asking what role the secret committee set up by Wolfowitz played in hyping the intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs. Secretary of State Colin Powell appears to be the only White House official who questioned the accuracy of the intelligence information coming out of the Office of Special Plans. A day before he was set to appear before the United Nations Feb. 5 to argue about the Iraqi threat and to urge the Council to support military action against the country, Powell omitted numerous claims provided to him by the Office of Special Plans about Iraq’s weapons program because the information was unreliable, according to an early February report in U.S. News and World Report. Powell was so disturbed about the questionable intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction that he put together a team of experts to review the information he was given before his speech to the U.N. Much of the information Powell's speech was provided by Wolfowitz’s Office of Special Plans, the magazine reported, to counter the uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq. Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, the magazine said. At one point, he became so infuriated at the lack of adequate sourcing by the Office of Special Plans to intelligence claims he said, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine. Spokespeople for Wolfowitz, Rice and the Vice President all denied the accusations, saying it was the CIA who provided the White House with the bulk of intelligence on Iraq and that there is no reason to believe the information isn’t accurate. Tenet’s spokespeople would not return several calls for comment. On Capitol Hill, Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee agreed that the panel would look investigate the Office of Special plans. Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., the committee's senior Democrat, said a preliminary inquiry by bipartisan staffers had found that news reports were credible that the Pentagon's "Office of Special Plans" had failed to share some intelligence with regular intelligence agencies and had provided information directly to Bush that wasn't verified through proper channels. Separately, the CIA, earlier this year, brought back four retired officials, led by former CIA deputy director Richard Kerr, to examine the agency’s pre-war intelligence and reporting on the Iraqi threat. Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board is also probing the issue, but whether any of the investigations include the Office of Special Plans is still undecided. Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter for the New Yorker, wrote an expose on the Office of Special Plans in May. In his story, he claims a Pentagon adviser told him that the committee "was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true – that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States." Feith, in a rare Pentagon briefing in May, denied that the Office of Special Plans was cherry-picking intelligence information to build a case for war in Iraq. The Office of Special Plans "was not involved in intelligence collection," Feith said. "Rather, it relied on reporting from the CIA and other parts of the intelligence community. Its job was to review this intelligence to help digest it for me and other policymakers, to help us develop Defense Department strategy for the war on terrorism… in the course of its work, this team, in reviewing the intelligence that was provided to us by the CIA and the intelligence community, came up with some interesting observations about the linkages between Iraq and al Qaeda." To date, however, the Pentagon has failed to provide any proof of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Still, the OSP or "The Cabal," as the group calls itself, according to the New Yorker story, played a significant role in convincing the White House that Iraq was a threat to its neighbors in the Middle East and to the United States. But the intelligence information and the Iraqi defectors the group relied heavily upon to prove its case were widely off the mark. For example, according to one CIA intelligence official in charge of weapons of mass destruction for the agency, the OSP is responsible for providing thee White House with the information that thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program. Bush said last September in a speech that attempts by Iraq to acquire the tubes point to a clandestine program to make enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. But experts contradicted Bush, saying that the evidence is ambiguous at best. It was later determined by the International Atomic Energy Agency that the tubes were designed to was to build rockets rather than for centrifuges to enrich uranium. Furthermore, the Iraqi defectors feeding the OSP with information about the locations of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction were said to be unreliable and responsible for sending U.S. military forces on a "wild goose chase," according to another CIA intelligence official. Case in point: In 2001, an Iraqi defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, told the OSP he had visited twenty secret facilities for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Saeed, a civil engineer, supported his claims with stacks of Iraqi government contracts, complete with technical specifications. Saeed said Iraq used companies to purchase equipment with the blessing of the United Nations - and then secretly used the equipment for their weapons programs. He claimed that chemical and biological weapons labs could be found in hospitals and presidential palaces, which turned out to be completely untrue, when the locations were searched. The OSP provided the National Security Council with Saeed’s findings last year and the information found its way into a White House report in December called, "Iraq: A Decade of Deception and Defiance." But the information never held up and turned out to be another big intelligence failure for the Bush administration. Judith Miller first brought the existence of Saeed to light in a New York Times story in December 2001 and again in January. The White House, in September 2002, cited the information provided by Saeed in a fact sheet. Whether a bipartisan probe into the OSP is convened remain to be seen, but one thing is certain, the committee of pseudo spies wields an enormous amount of power. Larry C. Johnson, a former counter-terrorism expert at the CIA and the State Department, says he's spoken to his colleagues working for both agencies and its clear that the OSP has politicized the intelligence process. "What they're experiencing now is the worst political pressure. Anyone who attempted to challenge or rebut OSP was accused of rocking the boat. OSP came in with an agenda that they were predisposed to believe," he said. Vinnie Cannistrano, who worked for the CIA for 27 years, told the National Journal last month that the OSP "incorporated a lot of debatable intelligence, and it was not coordinated with the intelligence community." =============== 2) http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030512fa_fact SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable? Issue of 2003-05-12 Posted 2003-05-05 They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question. The director of the Special Plans operation is Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Shulsky has been quietly working on intelligence and foreign-policy issues for three decades; he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Com-mittee in the early nineteen-eighties and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration, after which he joined the Rand Corporation. The Office of Special Plans is overseen by Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti, a retired Navy captain. Luti was an early advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the Administration moved toward war and policymaking power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities. W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the D.I.A., said, “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.” The hostility goes both ways. A Pentagon official who works for Luti told me, “I did a job when the intelligence community wasn’t doing theirs. We recognized the fact that they hadn’t done the analysis. We were providing information to Wolfowitz that he hadn’t seen before. The intelligence community is still looking for a mission like they had in the Cold War, when they spoon-fed the policymakers.” A Pentagon adviser who has worked with Special Plans dismissed any criticism of the operation as little more than bureaucratic whining. “Shulsky and Luti won the policy debate,” the adviser said. “They beat ’em—they cleaned up against State and the C.I.A. There’s no mystery why they won—because they were more effective in making their argument. Luti is smarter than the opposition. Wolfowitz is smarter. They out-argued them. It was a fair fight. They persuaded the President of the need to make a new security policy. Those who lose are so good at trying to undercut those who won.” He added, “I’d love to be the historian who writes the story of how this small group of eight or nine people made the case and won.” According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States. Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction had been a matter of concern to the international community since before the first Gulf War. Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons in the past. At some point, he assembled thousands of chemical warheads, along with biological weapons, and made a serious attempt to build a nuclear-weapons program. What has been in dispute is how much of that capacity, if any, survived the 1991 war and the years of United Nations inspections, no-fly zones, and sanctions that followed. In addition, since September 11th there have been recurring questions about Iraq’s ties to terrorists. A February poll showed that seventy-two per cent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th attacks, although no definitive evidence of such a connection has been presented. Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. “The agency was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,” the Pentagon adviser told me. “That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.” The goal of Special Plans, he said, was “to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see. Shulsky’s carrying the heaviest part.” Even before September 11th, Richard Perle, who was then the chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, was making a similar argument about the intelligence community’s knowledge of Iraq’s weapons. At a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing in March, 2001, he said, “Does Saddam now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does. We know he has chemical weapons. We know he has biological weapons. . . . How far he’s gone on the nuclear-weapons side I don’t think we really know. My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we’re able to prove and demonstrate. . . . And, unless you believe that we have uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more than we’re able to report.” Last October, an article in the Times reported that Rumsfeld had ordered up an intelligence operation “to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists” that might have been overlooked by the C.I.A. When Rumsfeld was asked about the story at a Pentagon briefing, he was initially vague. “I’m told that after September 11th a small group, I think two to start with, and maybe four now . . . were asked to begin poring over this mountain of information that we were receiving on intelligence-type things.” He went on to say, “You don’t know what you don’t know. So in comes the daily briefer”—from the C.I.A.—“and she walks through the daily brief. And I ask questions. ‘Gee, what about this?’ or ‘What about that? Has somebody thought of this?’” At the same briefing, Rumsfeld said that he had already been informed that there was “solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members.” If Special Plans was going to search for new intelligence on Iraq, the most obvious source was defectors with firsthand knowledge. The office inevitably turned to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. The I.N.C., an umbrella organization for diverse groups opposed to Saddam, is constantly seeking out Iraqi defectors. The Special Plans Office developed a close working relationship with the I.N.C., and this strengthened its position in disputes with the C.I.A. and gave the Pentagon’s pro-war leadership added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the I.N.C. to officials in the White House. There was a close personal bond, too, between Chalabi and Wolfowitz and Perle, dating back many years. Their relationship deepened after the Bush Administration took office, and Chalabi’s ties extended to others in the Administration, including Rumsfeld; Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; and I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. For years, Chalabi has had the support of prominent members of the American Enterprise Institute and other conservatives. Chalabi had some Democratic supporters, too, including James Woolsey, the former head of the C.I.A. There was another level to Chalabi’s relationship with the United States: in the mid-nineteen-nineties, the C.I.A. was secretly funnelling millions of dollars annually to the I.N.C. Those payments ended around 1996, a former C.I.A. Middle East station chief told me, essentially because the agency had doubts about Chalabi’s integrity. (In 1992, Chalabi was convicted in absentia of bank fraud in Jordan. He has always denied any wrongdoing.) “You had to treat them with suspicion,” another former Middle East station chief said of Chalabi’s people. “The I.N.C. has a track record of manipulating information because it has an agenda. It’s a political unit—not an intelligence agency.” In August, 1995, General Hussein Kamel, who was in charge of Iraq’s weapons program, defected to Jordan, with his brother, Colonel Saddam Kamel. They brought with them crates of documents containing detailed information about Iraqi efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction—much of which was unknown to the U.N. inspection teams that had been on the job since 1991—and were interviewed at length by the U.N. inspectors. In 1996, Saddam Hussein lured the brothers back with a promise of forgiveness, and then had them killed. The Kamels’ information became a major element in the Bush Administration’s campaign to convince the public of the failure of the U.N. inspections. Last October, in a speech in Cincinnati, the President cited the Kamel defections as the moment when Saddam’s regime “was forced to admit that it had produced more than thirty thousand liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. . . . This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and is capable of killing millions.” A couple of weeks earlier, Vice-President Cheney had declared that Hussein Kamel’s story “should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself.” The full record of Hussein Kamel’s interview with the inspectors reveals, however, that he also said that Iraq’s stockpile of chemical and biological warheads, which were manufactured before the 1991 Gulf War, had been destroyed, in many cases in response to ongoing inspections. The interview, on August 22, 1995,was conducted by Rolf Ekeus, then the executive chairman of the U.N. inspection teams, and two of his senior associates—Nikita Smidovich and Maurizio Zifferaro. “You have an important role in Iraq,” Kamel said, according to the record, which was assembled from notes taken by Smidovich. “You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq.” When Smidovich noted that the U.N. teams had not found “any traces of destruction,” Kamel responded, “Yes, it was done before you came in.” He also said that Iraq had destroyed its arsenal of warheads. “We gave instructions not to produce chemical weapons,” Kamel explained later in the debriefing. “I don’t remember resumption of chemical-weapons production before the Gulf War. Maybe it was only minimal production and filling. . . . All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.” Kamel also cast doubt on the testimony of Dr. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected in 1994. Hamza settled in the United States with the help of the I.N.C. and has been a highly vocal witness concerning Iraq’s alleged nuclear ambitions. Kamel told the U.N. interviewers, however, that Hamza was “a professional liar.” He went on, “He worked with us, but he was useless and always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything. . . . He was even interrogated by a team before he left and was allowed to go.” After his defection, Hamza became a senior fellow at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington disarmament group, whose president, David Albright, was a former U.N. weapons inspector. In 1998, Albright told me, he and Hamza sent publishers a proposal for a book tentatively entitled “Fizzle: Iraq and the Atomic Bomb,” which described how Iraq had failed in its quest for a nuclear device. There were no takers, Albright said, and Hamza eventually “started exaggerating his experiences in Iraq.” The two men broke off contact. In 2000, Hamza published “Saddam’s Bombmaker,” a vivid account claiming that by 1991, when the Gulf War began, Iraq was far closer than had been known to the production of a nuclear weapon. Jeff Stein, a Washington journalist who collaborated on the book, told me that Hamza’s account was “absolutely on the level, allowing for the fact that any memoir puts the author at the center of events, and therefore there is some exaggeration.” James Woolsey, the former head of the C.I.A., said of Hamza, “I think highly of him and I have no reason to disbelieve the claims that he’s made.” Hamza could not be reached for comment. On April 26th, according to the Times, he returned to Iraq as a member of a group of exiles designated by the Pentagon to help rebuild the country’s infrastructure. He is to be responsible for atomic energy. The advantages and disadvantages of relying on defectors has been a perennial source of dispute within the American intelligence community—as Shulsky himself noted in a 1991 textbook on intelligence that he co-authored. Despite their importance, he wrote, “it is difficult to be certain that they are genuine. . . . The conflicting information provided by several major Soviet defectors to the United States . . . has never been completely sorted out; it bedeviled U.S. intelligence for a quarter of a century.” Defectors can provide unique insight into a repressive system. But such volunteer sources, as Shulsky writes, “may be greedy; they may also be somewhat unbalanced people who wish to bring some excitement into their lives; they may desire to avenge what they see as ill treatment by their government; or they may be subject to blackmail.” There is a strong incentive to tell interviewers what they want to hear. With the Pentagon’s support, Chalabi’s group worked to put defectors with compelling stories in touch with reporters in the United States and Europe. The resulting articles had dramatic accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction or told of ties to terrorist groups. In some cases, these stories were disputed in analyses by the C.I.A. Misstatements and inconsistencies in I.N.C. defector accounts were also discovered after the final series of U.N. weapons inspections, which ended a few days before the American assault. Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in political science at Cambridge University, compiled and examined the information that had been made public and concluded that the U.N. inspections had failed to find evidence to support the defectors’ claims. For example, many newspapers published extensive interviews with Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer who, with the I.N.C.’s help, fled Iraq in 2001, and subsequently claimed that he had visited twenty hidden facilities that he believed were built for the production of biological and chemical weapons. One, he said, was underneath a hospital in Baghdad. Haideri was apparently a source for Secretary of State Colin Powell’s claim, in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council on February 5th, that the United States had “firsthand descriptions” of mobile factories capable of producing vast quantities of biological weapons. The U.N. teams that returned to Iraq last winter were unable to verify any of al-Haideri’s claims. In a statement to the Security Council in March, on the eve of war, Hans Blix, the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector, noted that his teams had physically examined the hospital and other sites with the help of ground-penetrating radar equipment. “No underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far,” he said. Almost immediately after September 11th, the I.N.C. began to publicize the stories of defectors who claimed that they had information connecting Iraq to the attacks. In an interview on October 14, 2001, conducted jointly by the Times and “Frontline,” the public-television program, Sabah Khodada, an Iraqi Army captain, said that the September 11th operation “was conducted by people who were trained by Saddam,” and that Iraq had a program to instruct terrorists in the art of hijacking. Another defector, who was identified only as a retired lieutenant general in the Iraqi intelligence service, said that in 2000 he witnessed Arab students being given lessons in hijacking on a Boeing 707 parked at an Iraqi training camp near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. In separate interviews with me, however, a former C.I.A. station chief and a former military intelligence analyst said that the camp near Salman Pak had been built not for terrorism training but for counter-terrorism training. In the mid-eighties, Islamic terrorists were routinely hijacking aircraft. In 1986, an Iraqi airliner was seized by pro-Iranian extremists and crashed, after a hand grenade was triggered, killing at least sixty-five people. (At the time, Iran and Iraq were at war, and America favored Iraq.) Iraq then sought assistance from the West, and got what it wanted from Britain’s MI6. The C.I.A. offered similar training in counter-terrorism throughout the Middle East. “We were helping our allies everywhere we had a liaison,” the former station chief told me. Inspectors recalled seeing the body of an airplane—which appeared to be used for counter-terrorism training—when they visited a biological-weapons facility near Salman Pak in 1991, ten years before September 11th. It is, of course, possible for such a camp to be converted from one purpose to another. The former C.I.A. official noted, however, that terrorists would not practice on airplanes in the open. “That’ s Hollywood rinky-dink stuff,” the former agent said. “They train in basements. You don’t need a real airplane to practice hijacking. The 9/11 terrorists went to gyms. But to take one back you have to practice on the real thing.” Salman Pak was overrun by American troops on April 6th. Apparently, neither the camp nor the former biological facility has yielded evidence to substantiate the claims made before the war. A former Bush Administration intelligence official recalled a case in which Chalabi’s group, working with the Pentagon, produced a defector from Iraq who was interviewed overseas by an agent from the D.I.A. The agent relied on an interpreter supplied by Chalabi’s people. Last summer, the D.I.A. report, which was classified, was leaked. In a detailed account, the London Times described how the defector had trained with Al Qaeda terrorists in the late nineteen-nineties at secret camps in Iraq, how the Iraqis received instructions in the use of chemical and biological weapons, and how the defector was given a new identity and relocated. A month later, however, a team of C.I.A. agents went to interview the man with their own interpreter. “He says, ‘No, that’s not what I said,’” the former intelligence official told me. “He said, ‘I worked at a fedayeen camp; it wasn’t Al Qaeda.’ He never saw any chemical or biological training.” Afterward, the former official said, “the C.I.A. sent out a piece of paper saying that this information was incorrect. They put it in writing.” But the C.I.A. rebuttal, like the original report, was classified. “I remember wondering whether this one would leak and correct the earlier, invalid leak. Of course, it didn’t.” The former intelligence official went on, “One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with—to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.” He added, “If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.” Shulsky’s work has deep theoretical underpinnings. In his academic and think-tank writings, Shulsky, the son of a newspaperman—his father, Sam, wrote a nationally syndicated business column—has long been a critic of the American intelligence community. During the Cold War, his area of expertise was Soviet disinformation techniques. Like Wolfowitz, he was a student of Leo Strauss’s, at the University of Chicago. Both men received their doctorates under Strauss in 1972. Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in the United States in 1937, was trained in the history of political philosophy, and became one of the foremost conservative émigré scholars. He was widely known for his argument that the works of ancient philosophers contain deliberately concealed esoteric meanings whose truths can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses. The Straussian movement has many adherents in and around the Bush Administration. In addition to Wolfowitz, they include William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, and Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who is particularly close to Rumsfeld. Strauss’s influence on foreign-policy decision-making (he never wrote explicitly about the subject himself) is usually discussed in terms of his tendency to view the world as a place where isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad, and face threats that must be confronted vigorously and with strong leadership. How Strauss’s views might be applied to the intelligence-gathering process is less immediately obvious. As it happens, Shulsky himself explored that question in a 1999 essay, written with Gary Schmitt, entitled “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)”—in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality. In the essay, Shulsky and Schmitt write that Strauss’s “gentleness, his ability to concentrate on detail, his consequent success in looking below the surface and reading between the lines, and his seeming unworldliness . . . may even be said to resemble, however faintly, the George Smiley of John le Carré’s novels.” Echoing one of Strauss’s major themes, Shulsky and Schmitt criticize America’s intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment. The agency’s analysts, Shulsky and Schmitt argue, “were generally reluctant throughout the Cold War to believe that they could be deceived about any critical question by the Soviet Union or other Communist states. History has shown this view to have been extremely naïve.” They suggested that political philosophy, with its emphasis on the variety of regimes, could provide an “antidote” to the C.I.A.’s failings, and would help in understanding Islamic leaders, “whose intellectual world was so different from our own.” Strauss’s idea of hidden meaning, Shulsky and Schmitt added, “alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.” Robert Pippin, the chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago and a critic of Strauss, told me, “Strauss believed that good statesmen have powers of judgment and must rely on an inner circle. The person who whispers in the ear of the King is more important than the King. If you have that talent, what you do or say in public cannot be held accountable in the same way.” Another Strauss critic, Stephen Holmes, a law professor at New York University, put the Straussians’ position this way: “They believe that your enemy is deceiving you, and you have to pretend to agree, but secretly you follow your own views.” Holmes added, “The whole story is complicated by Strauss’s idea—actually Plato’s—that philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians.” When I asked one of Strauss’s staunchest defenders, Joseph Cropsey, professor emeritus of political science at Chicago, about the use of Strauss ’s views in the area of policymaking, he told me that common sense alone suggested that a certain amount of deception is essential in government. “That people in government have to be discreet in what they say publicly is so obvious—‘If I tell you the truth I can’t but help the enemy.’” But there is nothing in Strauss’s work, he added, that “favors preëmptive action. What it favors is prudence and sound judgment. If you could have got rid of Hitler in the nineteen-thirties, who’s not going to be in favor of that? You don’t need Strauss to reach that conclusion.” Some former intelligence officials believe that Shulsky and his superiors were captives of their own convictions, and were merely deceiving themselves. Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis at the C.I.A., worked with Shulsky at a Washington think tank after his retirement. He said, “Abe is very gentle and slow to anger, with a sense of irony. But his politics were typical for his group—the Straussian view.” The group’s members, Cannistraro said, “reinforce each other because they’re the only friends they have, and they all work together. This has been going on since the nineteen-eighties, but they’ve never been able to coalesce as they have now. September 11th gave them the opportunity, and now they’re in heaven. They believe the intelligence is there. They want to believe it. It has to be there.” The rising influence of the Office of Special Plans has been accompanied by a decline in the influence of the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. One internal Pentagon memorandum went so far as to suggest that terrorism experts in the government and outside it had deliberately “downplayed or sought to disprove” the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. “For many years, there has been a bias in the intelligence community” against defectors, the memorandum said. It urged that two analysts working with Shulsky be given the authority to “investigate linkages to Iraq” by having access to the “proper debriefing of key Iraqi defectors.” A former C.I.A. task-force leader who is a consultant to the Bush Administration said that many analysts in the C.I.A. are convinced that the Chalabi group’s defector reports on weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda have produced little of value, but said that the agency “is not fighting it.” He said that the D.I.A. had studied the information as well. “Even the D.I.A. can’t find any value in it.” (The Pentagon, asked for comment, denied that there had been disputes between the C.I.A. and Special Plans over the validity of intelligence.) In interviews, former C.I.A. officers and analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. “George knows he’s being beaten up,” one former officer said of George Tenet, the C.I.A. director. “And his analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he’s been forced to do things their way.” Because the C.I.A.’s analysts are now on the defensive, “they write reports justifying their intelligence rather than saying what’s going on. The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want.” “They see themselves as outsiders, ” a former C.I.A. expert who spent the past decade immersed in Iraqi-exile affairs said of the Special Plans people. He added, “There’s a high degree of paranoia. They’ve convinced themselves that they’re on the side of angels, and everybody else in the government is a fool.” More than a year’s worth of increasingly bitter debate over the value and integrity of the Special Plans intelligence came to a halt in March, when President Bush authorized the war against Iraq. After a few weeks of fighting, Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed, leaving American forces to declare victory against a backdrop of disorder and uncertainty about the country’s future. Ahmad Chalabi and the I.N.C. continued to provoke fights within the Bush Administration. The Pentagon flew Chalabi and hundreds of his supporters, heavily armed, into Iraq, amid tight security, over angry objections from the State Department. Chalabi is now establishing himself in Baghdad. His advocates in the Pentagon point out that he is not only a Shiite, like the majority of Iraqis, but also, as one scholar put it, “a completely Westernized businessman” (he emigrated to England with his parents in 1958, when he was a boy), which is one reason the State Department doubts whether he can gain support among Iraqis. Chalabi is not the only point of contention, however. The failure, as of last week, to find weapons of mass destruction in places where the Pentagon’ s sources confidently predicted they would be found has reanimated the debate on the quality of the office’s intelligence. A former high-level intelligence official told me that American Special Forces units had been sent into Iraq in mid-March, before the start of the air and ground war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. “They came up with nothing,” the official said. “Never found a single Scud.” Since then, there have been a number of false alarms and a tip that weapons may have been destroyed in the last days before the war, but no solid evidence. On April 22nd, Hans Blix, hours before he asked the U.N. Security Council to send his team back to Iraq, told the BBC, “I think it’s been one of the disturbing elements that so much of the intelligence on which the capitals built their case seemed to have been so shaky.” There is little self-doubt or second-guessing in the Pentagon over the failure to immediately find the weapons. The Pentagon adviser to Special Plans told me he believed that the delay “means nothing. We’ve got to wait to get all the answers from Iraqi scientists who will tell us where they are.” Similarly, the Pentagon official who works for Luti said last week, “I think they’re hidden in the mountains or transferred to some friendly countries. Saddam had enough time to move them.” There were suggestions from the Pentagon that Saddam might be shipping weapons over the border to Syria. “It’s bait and switch,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “Bait them into Iraq with weapons of mass destruction. And, when they aren’t found, there’s this whole bullshit about the weapons being in Syria.” In Congress, a senior legislative aide said, “Some members are beginning to ask and to wonder, but cautiously.” For now, he told me, “the members don’t have the confidence to say that the Administration is off base.” He also commented, “For many, it makes little difference. We vanquished a bad guy and liberated the Iraqi people. Some are astute enough to recognize that the alleged imminent W.M.D. threat to the U.S. was a pretext. I sometimes have to pinch myself when friends or family ask with incredulity about the lack of W.M.D., and remind myself that the average person has the idea that there are mountains of the stuff over there, ready to be tripped over. The more time elapses, the more people are going to wonder about this, but I don’t think it will sway U.S. public opinion much. Everyone loves to be on the winning side.” Weapons may yet be found. Iraq is a big country, as the Administration has repeatedly pointed out in recent weeks. In a speech last week, President Bush said, “We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.” Meanwhile, if the American advance hasn’t uncovered stashes of weapons of mass destruction, it has turned up additional graphic evidence of the brutality of the regime. But Saddam Hussein’s cruelty was documented long before September 11th, and was not the principal reason the Bush Administration gave to the world for the necessity of war. Former Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been a strong supporter of the President’s decision to overthrow Saddam. “I do think building a democratic secular state in Iraq justifies everything we’ve done,” Kerrey, who is now president of New School University, in New York, told me. “But they’ve taken the intelligence on weapons and expanded it beyond what was justified.” Speaking of the hawks, he said, “It appeared that they understood that to get the American people on their side they needed to come up with something more to say than ‘We’ve liberated Iraq and got rid of a tyrant.’ So they had to find some ties to weapons of mass destruction and were willing to allow a majority of Americans to incorrectly conclude that the invasion of Iraq had something to do with the World Trade Center. Overemphasizing the national-security threat made it more difficult to get the rest of the world on our side. It was the weakest and most misleading argument we could use.” Kerrey added, “It appears that they have the intelligence. The problem is, they didn’t like the conclusions.” ------------ 3) http://www.reseauvoltaire.net/imprimer8843.html 2 janvier 2003 Propagande états-unienne Rumsfeld cible la France et l'Allemagne Pour balayer les objections de leurs alliés, les États-Unis ont décidé d'entreprendre de vastes campagnes de propagande en Europe en corrompant journalistes et écrivains. Ces opérations ne visent pas seulement à conquérir le consentement des opinions publiques à la politique impériale de Washington, elles ont aussi pour but d'éliminer les dirigeants politiques, les entreprises et les intellectuels qui s'opposent à elle. À la mi-décembre, Donald Rumsfeld a désigné la France et l'Allemagne comme cibles prioritaires. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- L'expression « diplomatie publique » désigne la « propagande » dans le jargon politiquement correct américain. Pendant la Guerre froide, les États-Unis investirent massivement dans la diplomatie publique pour contrer l'influence soviétique. Ce dispositif fut développé par Ronald Reagan au sein du Conseil de sécurité nationale, sous l'autorité du vice-président d'alors, George Bush senior. Il se délita progressivement lorsque l'URSS s'effondra. Seuls les Programmes internationaux d'information (International Informations Programs - IIP) survécurent. Il s'agit des émissions de Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty et Radio Free Asia. En 1999, à l'issue de la guerre du Kosovo, la secrétaire d'État Madeleine K. Albright prit acte de la détérioration de l'image des États-Unis dans le monde et de l'impact des agences alternatives d'information sur le Net. Elle institua alors un sous-secrétariat d'État à la diplomatie publique. Ce poste fut dévolu à Evelyn Simonowitz Lieberman. Dans un premier temps, l'administration Bush négligea ce service qui fut rattaché au porte-parole du département d'État, Richard Boucher. Mais il ne tarda pas à être pleinement restauré et confié à Charlotte Beers, qui prit ses fonctions juste après les attentats du 11 septembre 2001. Une violente rivalité opposa immédiatement le département d'État au département de la Défense pour le contrôle de cette fonction. Directive présidentielle 77 (déclassifiée) du 14 janvier 1983 organisant la « diplomatie publique » Voir le document intégral Le dispositif secret de la propagande US Général Simon P. Worden, chef de l'OSI Le secrétaire à la Défense, Donald Rumsfeld, institua en octobre 2001, dans le plus grand secret un Bureau d'influence stratégique (Office for the Strategic Influence - OSI) dirigé par le général Simon Pete Worden (un des promoteurs de la guerre asymétrique depuis l'espace). Les relations entre l'OSI et le sous-secrétariat d'État à la diplomatie publique furent articulées par le Groupe militaire d'information internationale (International Military Information Group - IMIG) du colonel Brad Ward. Ce nouveau dispositif fut immédiatement activé pour corriger l'impact de l'appel à la « croisade » de George W. Bush et convaincre les opinions publiques occidentales que les États-Unis ne mènent pas une guerre contre l'Islam. On se souvient ainsi de la subite montée au créneau d'intellectuels, dont certains étaient en réalité dûment appointés, nous assurant que le président Bush avait entendu ses conseillers et rectifié ses propos. Néanmoins, le New York Times révéla qu'une partie des fonds débloqués avait déjà été utilisée pour manipuler l'opinion publique aux États-Unis mêmes, en violation des dispositions légales en vigueur. L'administration Bush tenta d'expliquer qu'elle n'avait jamais cherché à intoxiquer les électeurs états-uniens, mais uniquement à désinformer les terroristes et à renverser les opinions publiques étrangères. Cependant, la mondialisation de l'information étant ce qu'elle est, il est aujourd'hui difficile de circonscrire la propagande à l'étranger. Aussi, le président ordonna-t-il la fermeture de l'OSI. William J. Luti, sous-secrétaire adjoint pour les plans spéciaux En réalité, l'OSI a été immédiatement reconstitué en secret. Un obscur poste de sous-secrétaire adjoint aux plans spéciaux (deputy under-secretary for special plans) a été créé au Pentagone et confié au capitaine William J. Luti (jusque-là conseiller de Dick Cheney). On ignore le montant de son budget, qui est toutefois qualifié de « très consistant ». Sous son contrôle, l'ex-OSI a été physiquement transféré au Strategic Command, où il est toujours dirigé par le général Simon P. Worden. Le dispositif a été considérablement développé en quelques mois. Des bureaux de propagande ont été créés dans chaque arme. La 8e division de l'Air Force, qui avait mené la campagne aérienne contre l'Allemagne nazie, a abandonné ses bombardiers pour ne plus être affectée qu'aux batailles internationales de la propagande (Worldwide Information Attacks). La Marine s'est dotée d'un Commandement de la guerre en réseaux (Naval Network Warfare Command). L'Armée de terre dispose quant à elle, de structures permanentes de propagande depuis l'occupation de l'Allemagne, de l'Autriche et du Japon, où elle attribuait les autorisations de publication. Enfin, le nouveau plan de l'état-major interarmes (Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan) place désormais la propagande au même niveau de préoccupation que les actions diplomatiques, les opérations militaires, et les conditions économiques. Pete Rodman, vice-secrétaire aux affaires de sécurité internationales Le sous-secrétaire adjoint William J. Luti travaille en étroite coordination avec les anciens réseaux « stay-behind », désormais identifiés sous le nom de code de « Gray Fox ». L'ensemble est supervisé par le vice-secrétaire aux affaires de sécurité internationales (assistant secretary for International Security Affairs), Pete Rodman (l'ancien conseiller en barbouzeries du Dr Henry Kissinger), lui-même placé sous l'autorité du sous-secrétaire Douglas J. Feith (un protégé de Richard Perle). Quatre objectifs principaux avaient initialement été fixés conjointement par le secrétariat d'État et le secrétariat à la Défense. Convaincre l'opinion publique internationale que : Les attentats du 11 septembre ne visaient pas les États-Unis, mais l'ensemble des nations civilisées. Les États-Unis ne mènent pas une guerre contre l'islam, mais contre les terroristes islamiques. Les États-Unis n'ont pas attaqué l'Afghanistan, mais soutenu le peuple afghan dans sa lutte contre les Talibans. Pour venir à bout du terrorisme international, toutes les nations civilisées doivent s'unir derrière les États-Unis. Douglas J. Feith, sous-secrétaire pour la politique de défense Chaque jour, chaque ambassade US dans le monde adresse à Charlotte Beers, sous-secrétaire à la diplomatie publique, un rapport sur l'évolution de la perception de ce message dans le pays hôte et un relevé des articles et émissions favorables qu'il a réussi à faire passer dans la presse locale. La publication d'un sondage réalisé dans 44 pays par le Pew Research Center, sous l'autorité de l'ancienne secrétaire d'État Madeleine K. Albright, début décembre 2002, a relancé le débat à Washington. Il montre une forte dégradation de l'image des États-Unis dans le monde et une hostilité grandissante à leur politique internationale en France et en Allemagne. DoD Directive 3600.1 Information Operations Tirant les leçons de ce constat, l'administration Bush a décidé de renforcer sa « diplomatie publique ». À l'issue du bras de fer entre départements rivaux, c'est en définitive la Défense qui jouera le rôle majeur en matière de propagande. Si c'est lui qui fixera les cibles, les thèmes de campagne seront élaborés par le sous-secrétariat d'État à la diplomatie publique qui a une plus grande expérience de la manipulation des populations étrangères. Le président de la Commission des Affaires internationales de la Chambre des représentants, Henry J. Hyde, est favorable à ce que le modeste budget du sous-secrétariat de Charlotte Beers soit augmenté à cette occasion et passe de 400 à 655 millions de dollars. Charlotte Beers, sous-secrétaire d'État à la diplomatie publique (au centre) Des instructions ultra-secrètes, identifiées sous l'appellation « DoD Directive 3600.1 Information Operations », ont été signées par Donald Rumsfeld à la mi-décembre. Elles autorisent des opérations de propagande à grande échelle pour influencer les opinions publiques dans les pays alliés et la prise de décision de leurs dirigeants politiques. L'ambiance des débats en cours à Washington avait été rapportée par France 2 à l'occasion d'une interview d'Edward Luttwak, diffusée le 9 décembre. Le célèbre stratège s'y exclamait : « Chirac a une addition à payer à Washington ! Il a une longue addition à payer à Washington Et, à Washington, il y a une décision évidemment de lui faire payer l'addition. Chirac, il a voulu manger et bouffer aux dépends des États-Unis sur la scène diplomatique et, évidemment, il va payer ? » Deux cibles principales ont été désignées dans ce cadre : la France et l'Allemagne. Ces États doivent être discrédités sur la scène internationale de manière à mettre un terme à leur influence contre la guerre en Irak. Ils sont considérés comme d'autant plus dangereux que l'Allemagne siègera en 2003 et 2004 comme membre temporaire du Conseil de sécurité et comme président du Comité des sanctions, tandis que la France présidera en janvier 2003 le Conseil de sécurité. Leurs dirigeants doivent être déconsidérés aux yeux de leurs électeurs, de manière à être évincés de la vie publique. L'image de marque des grandes entreprises qui soutiennent les politiques nationales d'hostilité à l'égard des États-Unis doit être ternie au point de leur faire perdre leur rang économique ; et les dirigeants de ces entreprises doivent être mis en cause dans leur compétence et leur probité. Les leaders d'opinion qui développent dans le public des sentiments hostiles à l'égard de la politique de Washington doivent être ostracisés des médias. Enfin, les groupes musulmans qui pourraient relativiser le concept de « guerre des civilisations » doivent être placés hors d'état de « nuire ». En ce qui concerne la France, les cibles principales sont : le président Jacques Chirac, Total-Elf-Fina, le consortium EADS (European Aeronautic Defense and Space), Thalès, Renault, et le Réseau Voltaire. Selon ce plan, des imputation diffamatoires seront publiées dans des médias étrangers de faible importance, puis reprises dans la presse française par des journalistes « sollicités ». La France sera présentée comme un pays intolérant en matière religieuse et antisémite parce que envahie et dominée par les musulmans. Les entreprises et industriels cibles seront présentés comme corrompus et déloyaux. Pour amplifier cette campagne, des livres seront également publiés par des intellectuels « sollicités ». À Washington, on ne doute pas de pouvoir faire passer les messages que l'on souhaite aussi bien dans la presse écrite qu'audiovisuelle française. Un soir de grève de la rédaction, n'a-t-on pas réussi à faire diffuser par France 2, à la place du journal de 20 heures, un épisode de JAG, un feuilleton de propagande de CBS très officiellement co-écrit par la CIA, sans soulever la moindre protestation ? D'ores et déjà, nous pouvons renverser ce petit jeu : qui, dans la presse et l'édition française a accepté d'encaisser les grasses « sollicitations » du Pentagone ? Thierry Meyssan Journaliste et écrivain, président du Réseau Voltaire. _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk