cross-referenced news and research resources about
Northern Gulf Affairs Office
(renamed in July 2003 to Northern Gulf Affairs Office)
The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was created by Secretary of Defense
Donald H. Rumsfeld to help create a case to invade Iraq. OSP evolved from the Northern Gulf Affairs Office, which fell under the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia policy office. It was renamed and expanded to the Office of Special Plans in October 2002 to to handle prewar and postwar planning. The name change was done to 'mask' its true mission."
[1].
In the days after September 11 terrorist attacks,
Paul Wolfowitz and
Douglas Feith started cooking intelligence to meet the needs of the radically new foreign and military policy that included regime change in
Iraq as its top priority.
To bolster the Iraq war party, they needed intelligence that would persuade the U.S. public and policymakers that
Saddam Hussein’s regime should be one of the first targets of the war on terrorism. Convinced that the
CIA,
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the
State Department would not provide them with type of alarmist threat assessments necessary to justify a preventive war, they created their own tightly controlled intelligence operation at the top levels of the Pentagon bureaucracy.
The day after the September 11 attacks Wolfowitz authorized the creation of an informal team focused on ferreting out damaging intelligence about Iraq. This loosely organized team soon became the Office of Special Plans (OSP) directed by
Abram Shulsky, formerly of RAND and the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC). The objective of this closet intelligence team, according to Rumsfeld, was to “search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists.” OSP’s mission was to create intelligence that the Pentagon and vice president could use to press their case for an Iraq invasion with the president and Congress.
Once the Office of Special Plans was set up formally, now they were informally set up prior to the fall of 2002, but formally they became an office with office space and that whole bit. And the first act to follow that setup of the Office of Special Plans, we had a staff meeting, and our boss, Bill Ludy, who was the boss of Special Plans technically, not in reality but on paper. And he announced to us that from now on, action officers, staff officers such as myself and all my peers, at least in that office, and I presume this went all the way through the rest of policy, but we were told that when we needed to fill in data, putting it in papers that we would send up, doing our job, as we did our daily job, we were no longer to look at CIA and DIA intelligence, we were simply to call the Office of Special Plans and they would send down to us talking points, which we would incorporate verbatim no deletions, no additions, no modifications into every paper that we did. And of course, that was very unusual and all the action officers are looking at each other like, well that's interesting. We're not to look at the intelligence any more, we're simply to go to this group of political appointees and they will provide to us word for word what we should say about Iraq, about WMD and about terrorism. And this is exactly what our orders were. And there were people [Laughs] a couple of people, and I have to say, I was not one of these people who said, “you know, I'm not gonna do that, I'm not gonna do that because there's something I don't like about it, it's incorrect in some way.” And they experimented with sending up papers that did not follow those instructions, and those papers were 100 percent of the time returned back for correction.
Office of Special Plans
(renamed in July 2003 to Northern Gulf Affairs Office)
The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was created by Secretary of Defense
Donald H. Rumsfeld to help create a case to invade Iraq. OSP evolved from the Northern Gulf Affairs Office, which fell under the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia policy office. It was renamed and expanded to the Office of Special Plans in October 2002 to to handle prewar and postwar planning. The name change was done to 'mask' its true mission."
[1].
In the days after September 11 terrorist attacks,
Paul Wolfowitz and
Douglas Feith started cooking intelligence to meet the needs of the radically new foreign and military policy that included regime change in
Iraq as its top priority.
To bolster the Iraq war party, they needed intelligence that would persuade the U.S. public and policymakers that
Saddam Hussein’s regime should be one of the first targets of the war on terrorism. Convinced that the
CIA,
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the
State Department would not provide them with type of alarmist threat assessments necessary to justify a preventive war, they created their own tightly controlled intelligence operation at the top levels of the Pentagon bureaucracy.
The day after the September 11 attacks Wolfowitz authorized the creation of an informal team focused on ferreting out damaging intelligence about Iraq. This loosely organized team soon became the Office of Special Plans (OSP) directed by
Abram Shulsky, formerly of RAND and the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC). The objective of this closet intelligence team, according to Rumsfeld, was to “search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists.” OSP’s mission was to create intelligence that the Pentagon and vice president could use to press their case for an Iraq invasion with the president and Congress.
Once the Office of Special Plans was set up formally, now they were informally set up prior to the fall of 2002, but formally they became an office with office space and that whole bit. And the first act to follow that setup of the Office of Special Plans, we had a staff meeting, and our boss, Bill Ludy, who was the boss of Special Plans technically, not in reality but on paper. And he announced to us that from now on, action officers, staff officers such as myself and all my peers, at least in that office, and I presume this went all the way through the rest of policy, but we were told that when we needed to fill in data, putting it in papers that we would send up, doing our job, as we did our daily job, we were no longer to look at CIA and DIA intelligence, we were simply to call the Office of Special Plans and they would send down to us talking points, which we would incorporate verbatim no deletions, no additions, no modifications into every paper that we did. And of course, that was very unusual and all the action officers are looking at each other like, well that's interesting. We're not to look at the intelligence any more, we're simply to go to this group of political appointees and they will provide to us word for word what we should say about Iraq, about WMD and about terrorism. And this is exactly what our orders were. And there were people [Laughs] a couple of people, and I have to say, I was not one of these people who said, “you know, I'm not gonna do that, I'm not gonna do that because there's something I don't like about it, it's incorrect in some way.” And they experimented with sending up papers that did not follow those instructions, and those papers were 100 percent of the time returned back for correction.
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updated Sat. February 4, 2023
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AlterNet
March 16, 2018
The Bush administration even created a parallel intelligence operation called the Office of Special Plans, based in the Pentagon, to provide senior government officials with raw intelligence, unvetted by intelligence community analysts. We all know how that turned out. Meanwhile, the liberal doves have ...
Iranian
March 15, 2018
The Pentagon's Office of Special Plans distributed the unsubstantiated and flawed intelligence that not even the CIA would vouch for. The Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith supplied bogus intelligence to the White House on Iraqi WMD and links to terrorist organizations to make the case ...
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
March 12, 2018
My answer is simple: because that is precisely what FDD is attempting to do. Just as Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, Office of Special Plans, did in 2002 and 2003 for Richard Bruce Cheney to lead us into war with Iraq. I've been there, done that. I don't need the tour. The salient question, though—why do ...
Antiwar.com (blog)
March 8, 2018
Just as Douglas Feith, undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Office of Special Plans, did in 2002 and 2003 for Richard Bruce Cheney to lead us in the war with Iraq. I've been there, done that. I don't need the tour. The salient question though – why do you believe that America is headed for a struggle with ...
International Middle East Media Center
March 5, 2018
My answer is simple: because that is precisely what FTD is attempting to do, just as Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Office of Special Plans did in 2002 and 2003 for Richard Bruce Cheney to lead us into war with Iraq. I've been there, done that. I don't need the tour. The salient question ...
Dissident Voice
March 2, 2018
Remember the clique that engineered the invasion, personnel centred on the Project for New American Century and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, notably Wolfowitz and Feith, and including Bolton, Libby, Abrams, Wurmser, Perle, Kristol and Kagan – with Rumsfeld and Cheney giving the putsch ...
Mondoweiss
February 7, 2018
WASHINGTON - JUNE 26: Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, testifies during a hearing of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee on pre-war intelligence relating to the 2003 invasion of Iraq on Capitol Hill June 26, 2006 in Washington, DC. The committee heard ...
The Cheat Sheet
January 25, 2018
The administration was tapping people's phone calls, getting information on them via the Internet, and harvesting private information about them — all without a warrant, which is unconstitutional. In addition, he had Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld created the Office of Special Plans, according to ...
Mother Jones
March 9, 2009
But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews‚ — some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity‚ — exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the ...
Atlantic Online
January 16, 2004
They set up their own shop in the Pentagon, called the Office of Special Plans, in order to sift through the information on Iraq themselves. To a great extent OSP personnel "cherry-picked" the intelligence they passed on, selecting reports that supported the Administration's pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest.
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office of special plans
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office of special plans
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