The mechanics behind Junior's sale of the Iraq War

Much ado is being made of the Pentagon's BS and contradictory synthesis of intelligence data that formed the bulwark of the White House's rationale for invading Iraq (WMD, Al-Qaeda connection), but less appreciated is that the White House itself set up the commitee at the Pentagon to supply the reports.

Any wonder the reports said, what they wanted to hear ?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...&refer=home
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/a...-news-a_section

--------
Feith's work had the blessing of his boss, former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The operation was set up at the behest of then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz with approval from Rumsfeld, Gimble noted. By most accounts, those three officials had distrust, if not disdain, for the work of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
-----------

And background from Wikipedia:
Following the declaration of victory in Afghanistan the Bush administration had started to plan for the next stage of the War on Terror. According to Kampfner “Emboldened by their experience in Afghanistan, they saw the opportunity to root out hostile regimes in the Middle East and to implant very American interpretations of democracy and free markets, from Iraq to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Wolfowitz epitomised this view.†Setting his sights on Iraq, which he had identified as a key region during his time as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs under U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Wolfowitz “saw a liberated Iraq as both paradigm and lynchpin for future interventions.†The difficulty was, as Hersh explains, “[a]fter a year of bitter infighting, the Bush Administration remains sharply divided about Iraq.â€[14] Wolfowitz had a plan to sell the war to the more skeptical members of the administration as well as the general public as he later clarified “[f]or bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.â€

The job of finding these WMD and providing justification for the attack would fall to the intelligence services but according to Kampfner “Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believed that while the established security services had a role, they were too bureaucratic and too traditional in their thinking.†As a result, borrowing an idea from their old Team B days, “they set up what came to be known as the ‘cabal’, a cell of eight or nine analysts in a new Office of Special Plans (OSP) based in the U.S. Defense Department.†According to a Pentagon source quoted by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker the OSP “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.â€[15]

Within months of being set-up the OSP “rivaled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda.†Hersh explains that the OSP “relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi.†According to Kampfner the CIA had ended its funding of the I.N.C. “in the mid-1990s when doubts were cast about Chalabi’s realiability.†However, according to Kampfner, “as the administration geared up for conflict with Saddam, Chalabi was welcomed in the inner sanctum of the Pentagon†under the auspices of the OSP and “Wolfowitz did not see fit to challenge any of Chalabi’s information.†The actions of the OSP have lead to accusation of the Bush administration "fixing intelligence to support policy" with the aim of influencing congress in its use of the War Powers Act. The arguments however did prove effective and the administration continues to focus on the Hussein regime's long history of involvement with international terrorist organizations and the current predominance of Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq.

This should be a lesson to all of the dangers inherent in a moronic president, machiavellian handlers, and skewed balance of powers come together.