6.5.03
Hersh on Pentagon "intelligence"
Seymour Hersh, America's favorite terrorist reporter, has an article on the Pentagon's "Office of Special Plans", largely responsible for cooking the "intelligence" presented in the lead-up to the Iraq war.Here's just one interesting quote from the article which shows just how ass-backwards the rationale for this war was:
According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true - that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States...No evidence to support those unfounded, irrational beliefs? Invent an office to take care of it. Perhaps there's a lesson here for the Vatican.
[A former intelligence officer stated:] "One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn?t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with?to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God."
