.
How
neo-cons influence the Pentagon
...
By Jim Lobe
08/08/03: (Asia Times) WASHINGTON - An ad hoc office under US
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted
as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative
political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to
lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East
and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created
by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
to review raw information collected by the official US intelligence
agencies for connections between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have
long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated
intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader
network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with
other George W Bush political appointees scattered around the national
security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired
Lieutenant-Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May
2002 through February 2003.
The heads of NESA and OSP were Deputy Undersecretary William Luti and
Abram Shulsky, respectively.
Other appointees who worked with them in both offices included Michael
Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative
American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an
expert on neo-conservative icon Winston Churchill and the younger
brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive
editor of the pro-Likud Jerusalem Post; and Chris Lehman, the brother of
the John Lehman, a prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of
the navy under former president Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski.
Along with Feith, all of the political appointees have in common a close
identification with the views of the right-wing Likud Party in Israel.
Feith, whose law partner is a spokesman for the settlement movement in
Israel, has long been a fierce opponent of the Oslo peace process, while
WINEP has acted as the think tank for the most powerful pro-Israel lobby
in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),
which generally follows a Likud line.
Also like Feith, several of the appointees were proteges of Richard
Perle, an AEI fellow who doubled as chairman until last April of
Rumsfeld's unpaid Defense Policy Board (DPB), whose members were
appointed by Feith, and also had an office in the Pentagon one floor
below the NESA offices.
Similarly, Luti, a retired naval officer, was a protege of another DPB
board member also based at AEI, former Republican Speaker of the House
of Representatives Newt Gingrich. Luti in turn hired retired Colonel
William Bruner, a former Gingrich staffer, and Chris Straub, a retired
lieutenant-colonel, anti-abortion activist, and former staffer on the
Senate Intelligence Committee.
Also working for Luti was another naval officer, Yousef Aboul-Enein,
whose main job was to pore over Arabic-language newspapers and CIA
transcripts of radio broadcasts to find evidence of ties between al-Qaeda
and Saddam that may have been overlooked by the intelligence agencies,
and a DIA officer named John Trigilio.
Through Feith, both offices worked closely with Perle, Gingrich and two
other DPB members and major war boosters - former CIA director James
Woolsey and Kenneth Adelman - in ensuring that the
"intelligence" that they developed reached a wide public
audience outside the bureaucracy.
They also debriefed "defectors" handled by the Iraqi National
Congress (INC), an opposition umbrella group headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a
long-time friend of Perle, whom the intelligence agencies generally
wrote off as an unreliable self-promoter.
"They would draw up 'talking points' they would use and distribute
to their friends," said Kwiatkowski. "But the talking points
would be changed continually, not because of new intel [intelligence],
but because the press was poking holes in what was in the memos."
The offices fed information directly and indirectly to sympathetic media
outlets, including the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and FoxNews
Network, as well as the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and
syndicated columnists, such as Charles Krauthammer.
In inter-agency discussions, Feith and the two offices communicated
almost exclusively with like-minded allies in other agencies, rather
than with their official counterparts, including even the DIA in the
Pentagon, according to Kwiatkowski.
Rather than working with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence
and Research, its Near Eastern Affairs bureau, or even its Iraq desk,
for example, they preferred to work through Undersecretary of State for
Arms Control and International Security (and former AEI executive vice
president) John Bolton; Michael Wurmser (another Perle protege at AEI
who staffed the predecessor to OSP); and Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State for Near East Affairs, Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of the Vice
President Dick Cheney.
At the National Security Council (NSC), they communicated mainly with
Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, until Elliott
Abrams, a dyed-in-the-wool neo-conservative with close ties to Feith and
Perle, was appointed last December as the NSC's top Middle East aide.
"They worked really hard for Abrams; he was a necessary link,"
Kwiatkowski told Inter Press Service on Wednesday. "The day he got
[the appointment], they were whooping and hollering, 'We got him in, we
got him in'."
They rarely communicated directly with the CIA, leaving that to
political heavyweights, including Gingrich, who is reported to have made
several trips to the CIA headquarters, and, more importantly, I Lewis
"Scooter" Lilly, Dick Cheney's chief of staff and national
security adviser.
According to recent published reports, CIA analysts felt these visits
were designed to put pressure on them to tailor their analyses more to
the liking of administration hawks.
In some cases, NESA and OSP even prepared memos specifically for Cheney
and Libby, something unheard of in previous administrations because the
lines of authority in the vice president's office and the Pentagon are
entirely separate. "Luti sometimes would say, 'I've got to do this
for Scooter'," said Kwiatkowski. "It looked like Cheney's
office was pulling the strings."
Kwiatkowski said that she could not confirm published reports that OSP
worked with a similar ad hoc group in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon's office. But she recounts one incident in which she helped
escort a group of half a dozen Israelis, including several generals,
from the first floor reception area to Feith's office. "We just
followed them, because they knew exactly where they were going and
moving fast."
When the group arrived, she noted the book which all visitors are
required to sign under special regulations that took effect after the
September 11, 2001. "I asked his secretary, 'Do you want these guys
to sign in'? She said, 'No, these guys don't have to sign in'." It
occurred to her, she said, that the office may have deliberately not
wanted to maintain a record of the meeting.
She added that OSP and MESA personnel were already discussing the
possibility of "going after Iran" after the war in Iraq last
January and that articles by Michael Ledeen, another AEI fellow and
Perle associate who has been calling for the US to work for "regime
change" in Tehran since late 2001, were given much attention in the
two offices.
Ledeen and Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, recently created the
Coalition for Democracy in Iran to lobby for a more aggressive policy
there. Their move coincided with suggestions by Sharon that Washington
adopt a more confrontational policy vis-a-vis Tehran.
Iran recently said it was prepared to turn over five senior al-Qaeda
figures, including the son of Osama bin Laden, who are currently in its
custody if Washington permanently shuts down an Iraqi-based Iranian
rebel group that is listed as a terrorist organization by the State
Department.
Pentagon officials, particularly Feith's office, have reportedly opposed
the deal, which had been favored by the State Department, because of the
possibility that the group, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, might be useful in
putting pressure on Tehran.
Inter Press Service:
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