news article on the Pentagons Office of Special Plans...MUST read!

[ElsewheresDaughter]

I've been screaming about the "Pentagons Office of Special Plans" for weeks all over the net...bush* created this little agency because he didn't like CIA"s intel...finally someone heard...Albany Times Union!!!


http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=151012&category=NATIONAL&BCCode=HOME&newsdate=7/13/2003



Planners faulted in Iraq chaos
Officials describe a secretive circle of senior civilians that shut out advice of CIA, State Department experts

By JONATHAN S. LANDAY and WARREN P. STROBEL, Knight-Ridder
First published: Sunday, July 13, 2003

WASHINGTON -- The small circle of senior civilians in the Defense Department who dominated U.S. planning didn't prepare for the chaos and violence embroiling postwar Iraq, according to senior government officials.
The officials didn't develop any real postwar plans because they believed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader as the country's leader. The Pentagon civilians ignored CIA and State Department experts who disputed them, resisted White House pressure to back off from their favored exile leader, and had no backup plan when their scenario collapsed amid increasing violence and disorder.

Today, American forces face instability in Iraq, where they are losing soldiers almost daily to escalating guerrilla attacks, the cost of occupation is exploding to almost $4 billion a month and withdrawal appears untold years away.

The story of the flawed postwar planning process was gathered in interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior government officials.

"There was no real planning for postwar Iraq," said a former senior U.S. official who left government recently.

Ultimately, the responsibility for ensuring that post-Saddam planning anticipated all possible complications lay with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, current and former officials said.

The Pentagon planning group, directed by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, the department's No. 3 official, included hard-line conservatives who had long advocated using the American military to overthrow Saddam. Its day-to-day boss was William Luti, a former Navy officer who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney before joining the Pentagon.

The Pentagon group insisted on doing it its way because it had a visionary strategy that it hoped would transform Iraq into an ally of Israel, remove a potential threat to the Persian Gulf oil trade and encircle Iran with U.S. friends and allies. The problem was that officials at the State Department and CIA thought the vision was badly flawed and impractical, so the Pentagon planners simply excluded their rivals from involvement.

more...

[ewagner]

1. Been hearing rumblings

about this for a couple of days. Wire services need to pick it up.
Major news needs to pick it up.

....have any friends in the press you can e-mail it to?

[madfloridian]

2. Post it here along, with a catchy subject.

A reporter told me he lurked, but did not have time to read a lot of long threads. Subject lines catch attention....not a bunch of exclamation points, just to the point ones.

I know a lot of media folk read here, but it was the first time one told me that.

Also isn't there another group by Rumsfeld with catchy initials? A couple of P's in it. They sort of stir up trouble to flush out terrorists.....not the safest thing for us? Or is this the one I am thinking about.

[madfloridian]

3. Aha! Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group. P2OG

Is this the same group?
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1028-11.htm
This is the group I think, called Proactive Pre-emption.
SNIP....."Rumsfeld's influential Defense Science Board 2002 Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism says in its classified "outbrief" -- a briefing drafted to guide other Pentagon agencies -- that the global war on terrorism "requires new strategies, postures and organization."

The board recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception.

Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces......"


Here are a couple more articles.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0506-06.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,818884,00.html

[NYC]

4. The best paragraph:

Ultimately, the responsibility for ensuring that post-Saddam planning anticipated all possible complications lay with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, current and former officials said.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

5. So in a nutshell, we have a very small group of people marketing the war,

controlling the plans, controlling the evidence that took us to war, controlling the country afterwards (poorly) and pointing fingers at everyone else!

Oh how I wish we had the old archives up, with our DPB thread in the meeting room...the triangulating is unprecendented...

[G_j]

6. Thank you

we are getting an increasingly concrete picture of the situation.
This article needs heavy circulation.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

7. i found this statement to be key....tenet & Cia were excluded

"...the State Department and CIA thought the vision was badly flawed and impractical, so the Pentagon planners simply excluded their rivals from involvement."

google "Pentagon Office of Special Plans"...amazing shit!

[Merlin]

8. Keep grinding that good axe, ElsewheresDaughter.

Good for you. This is, imo, a potential smoking stick of dynamite that could blow Rummy and Wolfy right out of the Pentagon.

They set up a private agency under civilian control that got almost all its "intelligence" from Chalabi and his group of expats, then bypassed State and the CIA and mainstreamed it directly to the POTUS.

What they also did was to conduct an elaborate new story planting operation in collaboration with the slimy Judith Miller of the NYT. What did the times do to verify Miller's rehash of Chalabi rumors? They called the Pentagon which turned them over to the OSP for confirmation.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2083736/

[ElsewheresDaughter]

11. Merlin thanks for the link...imho too this issue is the smoking gun

it should be!...it needs more mainstream...and i will keep shouting until it is!

[madfloridian]

9. Do a search on the P2OG and Rumsfeld.

You will find a lot, unless it has been disappeared. I did a search once and got some good hits. I am assuming this is the same secret organization as the OSP....heck, just how many could he have?

[w4rma]

10. "a four-person Pentagon team...self-mockingly called the Cabal"

Bush 'skewed facts to justify attack on Iraq'

A growing number of US national security professionals are accusing the Bush Administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq.

A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terror groups.

This team, self-mockingly called the cabal, "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defence Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence.
...
The INC, which brought together groups opposed to Saddam, worked closely with the Pentagon to build a case against Iraq. "There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal," Mr Cannistraro said.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/31/1054177765483.html

Cheney Investigated Forged Niger Uranuium Document

As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.

During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush, and other very senior policy makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.

The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy makers at the table.

Cheney got into the operational side of intelligence as well. Reports in late 2001 that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger stirred such intense interest that his office let it be known he wanted them checked out. So, with the CIA as facilitator, a retired U.S. ambassador was dispatched to Niger in February 2002 to investigate. He found nothing to substantiate the report and lots to call it into question. There the matter rested – until last summer, after the Bush administration made the decision for war in Iraq.
...
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=6e9d5502599dc6a2
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=5858&mesg_id=5858&page=

more:
Here is a lot of research: Bush, Cheney, the Cabal, ex-CIA agents/diplomats
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=27269&mesg_id=27269&page=

[ElsewheresDaughter]

12. w4rma ..wow thanks bookmarked!...helpspread this to all corners of the net

[ElsewheresDaughter]

13. patriotic kick

[inthecorneroverhere]

14. Thanx

Thanx 4 info!

:kick:

[yowzayowzayowza]

15. This one iz goin' down too soon...

:kick:

[ElsewheresDaughter]

16. thanks...important news ...a kick for the monday crowd