Office of Special Plans

The Office of Special Plans, which existed from September, 2002 to June, 2003, was a Pentagon unit conceived by Paul Wolfowitz that was reponsible for manufacturing the bogus intelligence used to sell the Iraq war^[1]. It was led by Douglas Feith and it provided the intelligence used to manufacture the case for a war against Iraq. OSP was dominated by prominent neocons and members of the Israel Lobby -- "the cabal", in their own words -- such as Abram Shulsky, Michael Rubin, David Schenker and Michael Makovsky. It worked alongside Feith's Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau. According to Jim Lobe:

Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.^[2]

According to Seymour Hersh, OSP relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress and by late 2002 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.

Abram Shulsky, its director, was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee 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. OSP was overseen by Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti who was an early advocate of military action against Iraq.

W. Patrick Lang, a former Middle East expert at the DIA, told Hersh, "The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government's foreign policy, and they've pulled it off. They're running Chalabi. The DIA has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there's no guts at all in the CIA."

Key Individuals

• Douglas Feith
• William Luti
• Abram Shulsky
• Michael Rubin
• David Schenker
• Michael Makovsky
• Larry Franklin
• John Trigilio
• Ladan Archin

External Resources

• History Commons Office of Special Plans
• RightWeb Office of Special Plans

References

1. ^Seymour Hersh, Selective Intelligence, New Yorker, 12 May 2003
2. ^ Jim Lobe, Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network, Inter Press Service, August 7, 2003

• The Fifth Estate: The Lies That Led To War, CBC, 7 March 2007