Rumsfeld And The OSP

According to the Independent Rummy's soundbites have become something of an institution among the UK press crowd.

"The tortured syntax, the rolling eyes and the faintly incomprehensible, slightly menacing utterances"

Rumsfeld...

"is mocked on the British airwaves – notably BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House, which created a Rumsfeld Soundbite of the Week feature."

But while the Brits hold no illusions about Rummy's sincerity, tactical prowess and diplomatic finesse it would seem Americans are more easily bamboozled.

According to the Spacewar article

US insistence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction is based on dubious intelligence from a shadowy Pentagon committee that now dominates US foreign policy, according to The New Yorker magazine.

By late last year, the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP) had grown to become President George W. Bush's main intelligence source, particularly over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the country's links to al-Qaeda, the magazine reported in its May 12 edition.

But the OSP, the brainchild of US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, relied on questionable intelligence from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi.

"You had to treat them with suspicion. The INC has a track record of manipulating intelligence because it has an agenda. It's a political unit, not an intelligence agency," a former senior CIA official specialising in the Middle East said in the article written by Seymour Hersh.

"One of the reasons I left was my sense that they (the Pentagon) were using the intelligence from the CIA and the other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn't like the intelligence they were getting and so they brought people in to write the stuff," the same official said.

"They were so crazed and far out and so difficult to reason with, to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God," he added.

W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the Pentagon's own intelligence agency, the DIA, told the magazine that the SPO's influence has spread beyond Iraq.

"The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government's foreign policy, and they've pulled it off ... The DIA has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there's no guts at all in the CIA," he said.

So why is it Americans are buying into this while our British counterparts can see through it? I would love to see the equivalent of a Rummy 'Soundbite of the Week' on tv. Heck I might even start watching it again. There was a time when our 'leaders' weren't spared the wrath of commentators, remember? It did happen even if it seems to have occurred in an alternate reality that no longer exists.

If there were such a show they could lampoon these recent comments ;

"I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. Saddam Hussein and his entire regime learned to live with UN inspections," Rumsfeld told "Fox News Sunday."

"The intelligence shows that they were systematically trying to prevent the inspectors from finding them."

"We're going to find what we find as a result of talking to people, I believe, not simply by going to some site and hoping to discover it," he said.

Asked if senior Iraqi officials now in US custody were providing information on weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld said lower-ranking officials would likely provide the most interesting leads.

"We're going to have to find people not at the very senior level, who are vulnerable, obviously, if they're in custody, but it will be people down below who had been involved in one way or another."

Rumsfeld said he still did know whether the deposed Iraqi leader was alive, but added: "If I had to guess, I would suspect that he may very well be alive."

"He and his crowd are gone. They're either in a tunnel someplace or in a basement hiding. We'll find them, if he's alive."

Update 5/6: Sisyphus Shrugged has the link to The New Yorker article mentioned above.