Office of Special Plans

Office of Special Plans which existed from September, 2002 to June, 2003, was a Pentagon unit that was conceived of by Paul Wolfowitz^[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, by late 2002, the Office of Special Plans had overshadowed the C.I.A. and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., and become Bush's main intelligence source on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and on Hussein's alleged Al Qaeda connections. Hersh continues, "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 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. 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, 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

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