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The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which existed from September 2002 to June 2003, was a Pentagon unit created by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and headed by Feith, as charged by then-United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to supply senior George W. Bush administration officials with raw intelligence (unvetted by intelligence analysts, see Stovepiping) pertaining to Iraq.〔Alexandrovna, Larisa. "(Senate Intelligence Committee Stalling Prewar Intelligence )," ''The Raw Story'', December 2, 2005. Retrieved May 22, 2007.〕 A similar unit, called the Iranian Directorate, was created several years later, in 2006, to deal with intelligence on Iran. ==Allegations of manipulation of intelligence== In an interview with the Scottish ''Sunday Herald'', former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Larry C. Johnson said the OSP was "dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace. (OSP ) lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated."〔Mackay, Neil (June 8, 2003) , ''Sunday Herald''. (Also about the British Operation Rockingham.)〕 Seymour Hersh writes that, according to an unnamed Pentagon adviser, "() was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, wanted 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 (WMD) that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States. () 'The agency () was out to ''disprove'' linkage between Iraq and terrorism,' the Pentagon adviser told me. 'That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.' The goal of Special Plans, he said, was 'to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see.'"〔Hersh, Seymour M. (May 5, 2003). ( Selective Intelligence ), ''New Yorker''.〕 These allegations are supported by an annex to the first part of Senate Intelligence Committee's Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq published in July 2004. The review, which was highly critical of the CIA's Iraq intelligence generally but found its judgments were right on the lack of an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, suggests that the OSP, if connected to an "Iraqi intelligence cell" also headed by Douglas Feith which is described in the annex, sought to discredit and cast doubt on CIA analysis in an effort to establish a connection between Saddam Hussein and terrorism. In one instance, in response to a cautious CIA report, "''Iraq and al-Qa'eda: A Murky Relationship''", the annex relates that "one of the individuals working for the (cell led by Feith ) stated that the June () report, '...should be read for content only – and CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored.'"〔(Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. ) (July 9, 2004). United States Select Senate Committee on Intelligence.〕 Douglas Feith called the office's report a much-needed critique of the CIA's intelligence. "It's healthy to criticize the CIA's intelligence", Feith said. "What the people in the Pentagon were doing was right. It was good government." Feith also rejected accusations he attempted to link Iraq to a formal relationship with Al Qaeda. "No one in my office ever claimed there was an operational relationship", Feith said. "There was a relationship."〔Feller, Ben, ("Ex-Pentagon Official Defends Iraq Stance" ), ''Associated Press'', February 11, 2007.〕 In another instance, an "Iraqi intelligence cell" briefing to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in August 2002 condemned the CIA's intelligence assessment techniques and denounced the CIA's "consistent underestimation" of matters dealing with the alleged Iraq-al-Qaeda co-operation. In September 2002, two days before the CIA's final assessment of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, Feith briefed senior advisers to Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, undercutting the CIA's credibility and alleging "fundamental problems" with CIA intelligence-gathering. As reported in the conservative British newspaper ''The Daily Telegraph'', "Senator Jay Rockefeller, senior Democrat on the () committee, said that Mr Feith's cell may even have undertaken 'unlawful' intelligence-gathering initiatives."〔Coman, Julian (July 11, 2004). (Fury over Pentagon cell that briefed White House on Iraq's 'imaginary' al-Qaeda links ), ''The Telegraph''〕 In February 2007, the Pentagon's inspector general issued a (report ) that concluded that Feith's office "developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers." The report found that these actions were "inappropriate" though not "illegal." Senator Carl Levin, Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, stated that "The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq. The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war." At Senator Levin's insistence, on April 6, 2007, the Pentagon's Inspector General's Report was declassified and released to the public. Feith stated that he "felt vindicated" by the report. He told the ''Washington Post'' that his office produced "a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance."〔 Feith also said the inspector general's report amounted to circular logic: "The people in my office were doing a criticism of the intelligence community consensus", Feith said. "By definition, that criticism varied. If it didn't vary, they wouldn't have done the criticism."〔Feller, Ben, ("Ex-Pentagon Official Defends Iraq Stance" ), ''Associated Press'', February 11, 2007〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Office of Special Plans」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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