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How neo-cons influence the Pentagon
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By Jim Lobe
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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