The Lie Factory
Mother Jones
January 26, 2004
BY ROBERT DREYFUSS & JASON VEST
Mother Jones, January/February 2004
Essential reading on the Office of Special Plans. This is where the books were cooked. Dreyfuss has written previously about the OSP as has Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker (articles readily available online through a simple internet search).
According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant." Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton's office. "The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," Thielmann told the New York Times. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things."