DSM in the MSM!!! How the facts were fixed. A look back.
Wed Jun 08, 2005 at 09:02:56 AM PDT
O.K. so the memo/minutes are getting a few seconds air time
lately finally. This is very good news. So many people have put so much into getting this memo in the US public's mind, let's not forget all the clues from the past that substantiate why this is the smoking gun. Let's remember old stories that were spun into the ground by the neo-crazies and their megaphones. I was bumping around online yesterday, and found a link to a July 17, 2003 story in the UK's
Guardian. There's been so much deception over the last four years, I had forgotten about these guys:
The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.
While I am sure most everyone here at dKos is fully aware of the OSP, I felt it was worth revisiting and remembering.
The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war.
Shadow government, indeed. These guys have been lurking for years.
The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results.
Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title.
Newt, you never fail to disappoint do you? Your name couldn't be more appropriate, unless it was "Slimeball".
Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.
Powerful stuff in light of the statement, "But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran." in the memo.
The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.
Can you say "Curveball"?
"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."
In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.
"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."
The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."
Can you say "Cherrypick"?
Then there was this juicy tidbit near the end of the article:
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
Excuse me, but didn't Feith just resign under pressure from an FBI investigation of him allegedly passing confidential Pentagon information to the Israeli Public Affairs Committee who in turn passed them to the Israeli assembly? What the...?
The article concludes with what we all suspected, and now the Downing Street memo has confirmed.
The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.
In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.
That's right, they made it a "product" to sell. Most of us knew that. But now that the memo is getting some air-time, let's not let the spinmiesters spin this away--we can fact check their asses!
P.S. Sorry to regurgitate old news, but I thought it was worth remembering today and the Guardian article was very detailed and well-written.
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