WASHINGTON: On most days, the Pentagon’s ‘Early Bird’, a daily compilation of news articles on defence-related issues mostly from the US and British press, does not shy from reprinting hard- hitting stories and columns critical of the Defence Department’s top leadership.

But few could help notice last week that the ‘Bird’ omitted an opinion piece distributed by the Knight-Ridder news agency by a senior Pentagon Middle East specialist, Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith until her retirement in April.

“What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline,” Kwiatkowski wrote. “If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of ‘intelligence’ found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam (Hussein) occupation (in Iraq) has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defence” (OSD).

Kwiatkowski went on to charge that the operations she witnessed during her tenure in Feith’s office, and particularly those of an ad hoc group known as the Office of Special Plans (OSP), constituted “a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress”.

Kwiatkowski’s charges, which tend to confirm reports and impressions offered to the press by retired officers from other intelligence agencies and their still-active but anonymous former colleagues, are likely to make her a prime witness when Congress reconvenes in September for hearings on the manipulation of intelligence to justify war against Iraq.

According to Kwiatkowski, the same operation that allegedly cooked the intelligence also was responsible for the administration’s failure to anticipate the problems that now dog the US occupation in Iraq, or, in her more colourful words, that have placed 150,000 US troops in “the world’s nastiest rat’s nest, without a nation-building plan, without significant international support and without an exit plan”.

Kwiatkowski’s comments echo the worst fears of some lawmakers, who have begun looking into the OSP’s role in the administration’s mistaken assumptions in Iraq. Some are even comparing it to the off-the-books operation run from the National Security Council (NSC) during Reagan administration that later resulted in the “Iran-Contra” scandal.

“That office was charged with collecting, vetting, disseminating intelligence completely outside the normal intelligence apparatus,” Rep. David Obey, a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, said last month.

“In fact, it appears that the information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with the established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than (the secretary of defence)”.

Actually, little is known about OSP, which was originally created by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to investigate possible links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda group.

While only a dozen people officially worked in the office at its largest, scores of “consultants” were brought in on contract, many of them closely identified with the neo- conservative and pro-Likud views held by the Pentagon leadership.

There have been published reports that a similar informal group co-ordinated closely with the OSP from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office, but these have not been confirmed.

Headed by a gung-ho former Navy officer, William Luti, and a scholarly national-security analyst, Abram Shulsky, OSP was given complete access to reams of raw intelligence produced by the US intelligence community and became the preferred stop, when in town, for defectors handled by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), led by Ahmed Chalabi.

It also maintained close relations with the Defence Policy Board (DPB), which was then chaired by neo-conservative Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Feith’s mentor in the Reagan administration.

Perle and Feith, whose published views on Israeli policy echo the right-wing Likud party, co-authored a 1996 memo for then- Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that argued that Saddam Hussein’s ouster in Iraq would enable Israel to transform the balance of power in the Middle East in its favour.

The DPB included some of Perle’s closest associates, including former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey and former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who played prominent roles in pushing the public case that Iraq represented an imminent threat to the United States and that its was closely tied to Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks.

In her article, Kwiatkowski wrote that OSP’s work was marked by three major characteristics:

First, career Pentagon analysts assigned to the Secretary’s office were generally excluded from “key areas of interest” to Feith, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld, notably Israel, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. “In terms of Israel and Iraq, all primary staff work was conducted by political appointees, in the case of Israel, a desk officer appointee from the Washington Institute for Near Policy”, a think tank closely tied to the main pro-Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Second, the same group of appointees tended to work with like- minded political appointees in other agencies, especially the State Department, the NSC, and Cheney’s office, rather than with those agencies’ career analysts or the CIA.

“I personally witnessed several cases of staff officers being told not to contact their counterparts at State or the National Security Council because that particular decision would be processed through a different channel,” Kwiatkowski wrote.

The CIA’s exclusion from this network could help explain why Cheney and his National Security Advisor, I. Lewis Libby, a long- time associate of Wolfowitz, frequently visited the agency, in what analysts widely regarded as pressure to conform to OSP assessments.

This exclusion of professional and independent opinions, both within the Pentagon and across government agencies — according to Kwiatkowski — resulted in “Groupthink”, a technical term defined as “reasoning or decision-making by a group, often characterised by uncritical acceptance of conformity to prevailing points of view”.

In this case, the prevailing points of view were presumably shaped by neo-conservatives like Feith, Wolfowitz and Perle, and the “intelligence” provided by the INC.

Kwiatkowski’s broadside coincides with the appearance in neo- conservative media outlets, notably the ‘Wall Street Journal’, of defences of Feith, who is widely seen here as the Pentagon’s most likely fall guy if it is forced to shoulder blame for bad intelligence and planning. The government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair has pressed Bush to fire Feith for several months, according to diplomatic sources.

In a lengthy defence published on Tuesday, the associate editor of the Journal’s editorial page described Feith’s policy workshop as “the world’s most effective think tank”.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.