Office off Special Plans

The “office of the special means”, Office off Special Plans or OSP , credit of September 2002 at June 2003, was a unit of information Department of Defense of the United States, installation shortly after the attacks of the September 11th 2001. Created by Donald Rumsfeld and directed by Douglas Feith, to provide Information to the high ranking officials of the Administration Bush.

Contrary to the other American intelligence services, the OSP was independent of the Intelligence Community and the Defense Intelligence Community, and was placed directly under the authority of the under-secretary to Defense William Luti. Its official mission was to get for the American executive the information that the Intelligence Community appeared unable to find.

The OSP was composed of ten people (analysts and political advisers), who the have-same called OSP “the Cabale”. Its director was since his creation Abram Shulsky.

Its work had been focused on the Iraq during the prelude to the release of the hostilities by the Bush administration.

A similar unit, under the name of “Iranian Directorate” ( Iranian Directorate ), is supposed to be created in 2006 in order to work with the information on the Iran.

Discusses on the effectiveness and the real role of the OSP

Not objectivity and errors of the analyzes of the OSP

The members of the OSP are criticized to have nona obvious objectivity which would largely influence their reports/ratios. Completely inhabited by the idea that Saddam Hussein had bonds with Al-Qaida and hid weapons of massive destruction, they consider the reliability of information they have consequently and conclude that they are true when they consolidate these assumptions. An officer of information interviewed under cover of anonymity by the journalist Seymour Hersh thus summarized: “I had the feeling which the Cabal used information of the CIA and other agencies only when they corresponded to their personal program. When they did not like the information that one delivered to them, they mobilized correspondents who wrote the reports/ratios to them which they needed. They were so much in the west and so difficult to reason that took odd forms. Ca felt the dogma. As if they held their mission of the mouth of God… All that does not stick with their theories, they transfer it. ” The insulation of the members of the OSP, which works only between them and never with the other services, consolidates them in their convictions. The sources of the OSP on Iraq are primarily Iraqi Transfuge S with which they are put in contact by the CNI (Iraqi National congress) of Ahmed Chalabi of which reliability is very disputed by the CIA, because CNI remains before a a whole political organization and not a service of espionage, and that its political goals influence the information that it passes to the Americans. In the past, of much information appeared false and exaggerated. In spite of that, the OSP considered that information of the defectors was more reliable. Vis-a-vis these criticisms, the OSP reacted by counter-charges, suspecting its detractors of being misused or accessory to Iraq. Abram Shulsky is inter alia specialist in the Soviet misinformation. In an article written in collaboration with Gary Schmitt in 1999, it estimates that the American information always underestimates the duplicity of the foreign governments. Thus, a memo of the Pentagon even went until suggesting that the analysts of the other agencies deliberately would have hidden or underestimated the bonds between Iraq and Al-Qaida. The detractors of the OSP have a very strong argument, which is the low value of the analyzes of the OSP: the searchs for not-conventional weapons in Iraq were negative, and the investigation of the Senate into the September 11th concluded that Iraq had not played any part in the attacks.

Influence political OSP and loss of influence of the other intelligence services

The creation of a service as discussed leaves supposed as its real goal was not to be more effective than the existing services but had a political goal. This goal would be to constitute a convincing file on the " weapons of destruction massive" and bonds between " Al-Qaida " and Saddam Hussein to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, while choking the analyzes of the intelligence services which supporting the opposite. Indeed, information of DIA and the CIA contradicted these justifications. The reports/ratios of the OSP go directly to the Secretary to the Donald Rumsfeld Defense, which can thus give them to president Bush without them being controlled by DCI George Tenet. They thus have a great influence on the decisions taken at the White House. In the documentary one of William Karel the CIA, secret wars, the old agent of the CIA Robert Steele declared (without quoting the OSP explicitly): “It chair Bush is with the hands of a group of extreme right-hand side. This group is besides if extremist that it puts from now on ahead his own analyzes and the subsitue at those of the CIA. These people nourish it with the clean direction of the term, and make him swallow what they want instead of him to provide information which it needs as a president” The OSP would thus be used to direct the American policy, and indirectly by the official declarations of the White House, to influence the American opinion in the direction wanted by the Bush administration. The level of influence of the OSP on the management of the Iraqi business is enormous: the documents of Colin Powell presented to UNO to obtain a mandate of intervention resulted largely from this service. The arguments in favor of this thesis are the selection of the analysts among people persuaded of their assumptions and the fact that the OSP depends on the under-secretary to the Defense William Luti, which was one of the first to advise the invasion of Iraq.

A consequence of the reports/ratios of the OSP is to have made lose their credibility at the other intelligence services, with the CIA, the DIA and even at the State Department of Colin Powell. In their reports/ratios, the analysts of the CIA sought more and more to justify information they had. Moreover, the bringing together of the OSP with CNI drew aside the CIA CNI, depriving it of information recuellies by the men of Chalabi.

Revelation of the existence of the OSP

The newspaper The Times British in October 2002 evoked an intelligence service established " to seek information which the CIA could have neglected on the hostile intentions of Iraq or its bonds with the terroristes." But it is the journalist Seymour Hersh who revealed the existence of the OSP in his article Selective Intelligence of New Yorker of May 12th, 2003.

See too

Internal bonds

External bonds and documents

Ignacio Ramonet, Weapons of massive intoxication: Lies of State, diplomatic Le Monde

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