Recently the congressional intelligence (is that an oxymoron?) committee issued a report finding fault with the intelligence community over the false intelligence relating to Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction and links to Al Queda. The report on how the Bush administration handled the whole matter of intelligence was postponed until after the November elections by the Republican controlled majority of the committee. Convenient huh?
In the summer before the Iraq invasion, I read in a news article about the forming of an “intelligence” unit in the pentagon under the guidance of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith. The unit was called the Office of Special Plans. It was painfully obvious from the article that the unit was founded specifically because the pentagon was not getting the kind if intelligence it wanted from the CIA and other intelligence organizations. Their job was to comb the raw data and find things that supported the conclusions that they wanted to find without assessing the reliability of the sources for the information. This intelligence was then fed directly to the Vice-president’s office without analysis. These became the reasons that were fed to the American public to justify the invasion of Iraq.
For some reasons, the news media can’t seem to devote any significant amount of time to this story. Should we wonder why? I’ll get into media ownership and what the media wants from the government and which party is liable to give them what they want in another post.
Read on…
Fury over Pentagon cell that briefed White House on Iraq's 'imaginary' al-Qaeda links
Feith Is the Answer
Posted by: ed Fladung | Monday, September 06, 2004 at 11:45 PM