Re: French Join In on Anti-France Bandwagon

And who driving the change in Washington??  see www.larouchein2004.com
and the following rare truthfull admission by one of Perle's
underlings:

Insight on the News - National 
Issue: 12/09/03 

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Democrats Target Pentagon Planning
By Kenneth R. Timmerman 

The sordid tale now making the rounds in the "mainstream" press of a
rogue Pentagon intelligence operation has all the elements of an urban
legend: heavy breathing, a secret basement office "down by the ramp"
and government officials who form a hidden alliance based on long-ago
ties to an obscure but influential university guru. Only the work of a
few good men with the courage to face up to this "cabal" - and a few
crusader-journalists to help them - can make the demons scatter and
scare the dark ones into the light. Or so the story goes on those
increasingly febrile Democratic Party Websites.

All this silliness could become deadly serious if Senate Democrats get
their way, led by Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the
vice chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSIC). For
now, the controversy revolves around a suite of crammed cubicles on
the fourth floor of the Pentagon that in September 2002 was renamed
the Office of Special Plans (OSP). At that time the office consisted
of only four persons. But it soon became apparent that the Pentagon
needed to begin serious planning for the postwar reconstruction of
Iraq in the event the president made the decision to go to war.

On orders from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz the office was
expanded to 16 persons, including two detailee Army
judge-advocate-general officers - lawyers whose job was to explore the
legal framework for conducting potential war-crimes investigations of
members of Saddam's regime.

"In hindsight, that may have been an unfortunate choice of name," an
administration official tells Insight during an extensive interview on
the operations of the OSP. "But we didn't want to have a 16-man Iraqi
planning group set up at a time when the president was conducting
negotiations at the U.N. because it would have undercut his diplomatic
approach."

The OSP grew out of the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs, one of many
regional bureaus that reports through the assistant secretary of
defense for international security affairs to the head of the
Pentagon's policy shop, Undersecretary Doug Feith. "As we were gearing
up for the Iraq campaign in September 2002, the deputy decided that we
needed to expand the Northern Gulf directorate because of the
tremendous workload. There were literally dozens of new tasks we had
to do. And there were just four of us," the official explains.

The head of the unit, Navy Capt. William Luti, came to the Pentagon
after working for Vice President Dick Cheney at the White House. He
was given a promotion, a new title (deputy undersecretary for Special
Plans and Near East/South Asia affairs) and a handful of new bodies to
carry out the work. Some of the new bodies were given cubicles in a
hastily painted spillover office suite in a former storage area on the
first floor of the Pentagon - not in the basement. ("Isn't that down
by the ramp?" Washington Post reporter Dana Priest asked Luti's office
conspiratorially. Insight verified the location of the office: Luti's
desk warriors have windows.)

Among their urgent new tasks were to develop defense policies aimed at
building an international coalition, prepare the secretary of defense
and his top deputies for interagency meetings, coordinate
troop-deployment orders, craft policies for dealing with prisoners of
war and illegal combatants, postwar assistance and reconstruction
policy planning, postwar governance, Iraqi oil infrastructure policy,
postwar Iraqi property disputes, war crimes and atrocities, war-plan
review and, in their spare time, prepare congressional testimony for
their principals. "We are a policy shop, not an organization that
collects or creates intelligence," the official says. "We were asked
to do stratospheric planning. Others took the concepts and turned them
into action plans" [see "Details of the Postwar Master Plan."].

Some of the tension between the OSP and the intelligence community
(which has been the source of many of the rumors about the OSP) came
from faulty intelligence that was fed to the war planners. "War
planning is based on assumptions that you make, based on the available
data. For example: The CIA told us that all we had to do with the
Iraqi police was lop off the top layer of leadership and everything
else would fall in line. This was [former U.S. civilian administrator
for Iraq and retired Gen. Jay] Garner's plan going in," the official
says. "Well, we lopped off the top layer of leadership and found the
corruption went so deep that we had to start from scratch. Was it a
mistake? Yes. But it was a mistake that came from faulty
intelligence."

Luti and others from the office regularly took part in interagency
meetings to develop postwar plans and Congress was regularly briefed
on their efforts. Despite this, the same critics who blast the
Pentagon for establishing the Office of Special Plans today are
whining about a lack of planning. "It's unfortunate that the president
had no plan for what to do in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein,"
Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) told National Public Radio on Nov. 14.

"We so underestimated and underplanned and underthought about a
post-Saddam Iraq that we've been woefully underprepared," added
Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, now known among political
conservatives as the senator from France.

The rigor and extent of the prewar planning kept the war from spinning
out of control. "Turkey didn't come in. The Kurds didn't have a civil
war. Israel didn't come. There were no oil fires, no ecological
disasters, no large numbers of internally displaced people, no
refugees," the official involved in the planning says. "The country
didn't split apart, there was no ethnic-on-ethnic fighting, which
everybody had predicted. Why? Because we had all these plans in place.
We had food stockpiled ahead of time. We had humanitarian-assistance
equipment, we had medical supplies. We were prepared for all of these
contingencies."

So how did a legitimate and effective Iraq planning office get painted
as a dire "cabal?" As incredible as it may seem, it began with
conspiracy-theorist Lyndon LaRouche, a self-styled Democratic Party
presidential aspirant who claimed in March that a "cabal" of
pro-Israel conservatives he called the "Children of Satan" were
running a rogue intelligence operation at the Pentagon. Their mission:
fabricate intelligence and drag the United States into a needless war,
all at Israel's bidding. It was all very dark, murky and
conspiratorial. If responsible journalists had been doing their job,
the story never would have crept from the LaRouche Website into the
light.

Instead, like a virus jumping from animals to humans, the story
erupted in a May 6 article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Hersh,
a former New York Times investigative reporter, pumped it up into a
full-blown feature of 5,500 words. He quoted former Defense
Intelligence Agency officers who had never set foot in the Pentagon
office or had any direct dealings with it and used sources such as
Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official who in 1995 was cited as a
witness for a convicted terrorist leader. "Hersh was briefed on this
office and told all about it, but he wrote it anyway," an
administration official says. Since Hersh's piece, the virus migrated
to Newsweek, Time, Britain's Guardian newspaper and now has become the
subject of an inquiry by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

"They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal," Hersh wrote
breathlessly. "These advisers and analysts, who began their work in
the days after Sept. 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence
reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and [U.S.] policy
toward Iraq. ... By last fall, the operation rivaled both the CIA and
the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, as President
[George W.] Bush's main source of intelligence regarding Iraq's
possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with
al-Qaeda."

In the world of the conspiracy theorist, the real "director" of the
special-plans office was not Luti but Abram Shulsky, a scholarly
expert in the works of the long-deceased political philosopher Leo
Strauss, according to Hersh. Strauss was a longtime University of
Chicago professor who died in 1973. Taking LaRouche's lead, Hersh
painted Shulsky as the secret leader of a cabal of American Jews whom
he alleged were perpetrating a massive fraud on the American people.
The term "cabal" is favored by anti-Semites and LaRouche to describe
their claims of a Jewish world conspiracy. (In fact, the office was
run by Luti, but it may be that his name didn't fit the conspiratorial
bill).

Britain's left-wing Guardian newspaper called Luti's office a "shadow,
right-wing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess
the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by
force." But the real crime of the OSP was to listen to defectors who
had been brought out of Iraq by the opposition Iraqi National Congress
(INC) led by Ahmad Chalabi, the Guardian and others alleged. In late
September, Time magazine "revealed" that INC Washington representative
Francis Brooke was "in weekly contact" with Luti by phone.

Chalabi indeed did visit once with Luti at the OSP in fall 2002,
according to the visitor sign-in sheet in Luti's front office. Chalabi
also visited with the secretary of defense, the deputy secretary and a
host of other top officials and members of Congress. And Chalabi
proudly has acknowledged to this reporter and many others the INC's
role in recruiting defectors and presenting them to the U.S.
government. In the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, being able to recruit
defectors was literally priceless.

The INC's intelligence-collection program, run for years on a
shoestring by Chalabi and a few top aides, was taken over by the
Pentagon in 2002 and handed over to the Defense Human Service - the
human intelligence (HUMINT) side of the DIA - not the Office of
Special Plans. "DHS established rules and regulations and put it on a
professional basis," a Pentagon official told Insight before the war.

Luti's office now stands accused by Sens. Rockefeller and Carl Levin
(D-Mich.) of illegally organizing clandestine intelligence operations
overseas. In an Oct. 1 request for documents to Undersecretary Feith
on behalf of Democrats sitting on the Senate Select Intelligence
Committee, Rockefeller quoted an article in the left-wing weekly The
Nation alleging that Feith's staff "have been coordinating their
terrorism assessments with 'a rump unit established last year in the
office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel.'" The letter also
alleged that Luti's staff had been "sent abroad to meet with defectors
produced by the INC," and had held unauthorized meetings with
"Iranians" in Western Europe.

"This is Church committee stuff," an administration official tells
Insight, referring to the disastrous Senate Select Intelligence
Committee of the mid-1970s that was responsible for gutting the CIA's
clandestine services. "The SSIC is more worried about getting the
president than it is in fixing the intelligence mess," this source
says. Little wonder that Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.) has said that if
what his fellow Democrats have done on the SSIC to try to undermine
the war effort in Iraq for political purposes is not treason, then "it
is its first cousin." As election fever takes hold of the most
partisan Democrats, many expect it to get worse.

Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight. His latest book,
Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America, has just been
published by Crown Forum.

For more on this story, read "Details of the Postwar Master Plan." 


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"CB" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> Wednesday, November 26, 2003
> By Greg Palkot
> 
> PARIS  - France's opposition to military action in Iraq sparked a backlash
> around the globe, but criticism of the country is now coming from an
> unlikely source - the French themselves.
> 
> In the last few months, there have been a slew of books published in the
> country slamming French policy with titles that translate to: "The Arrogant
> French," "The French in Disarray," and "France in Free-Fall."
> 
> "France has a great obstructive power, destructive power and this is very
> dangerous for France itself," said Andre Glucksmann, author of "West Versus
> West."
> 
> Readers are snapping up books that question whether or not the policies of
> French president Jacques Chirac (search) are hurting their homeland.
> 
> "A great many French officials hoped that we would fail in Iraq," said
> Richard Perle (search), former chairman of the Defense Policy Board
> (search).
> 
> "With the help from the United Nations and the European Union, Chirac wants
> to revive France's glory days, an effort that some wonder if he's
> overreaching."
> 
> France's policies on war aren't the country's only controversial decisions
> these days. Protests by workers are frequent and a worrying wave of
> anti-Semitism is spreading.
> 
> "There are a number of challenges," said Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, author of "An
> Alliance at Risk: The United States and Europe Since September 11." "The
> question is whether the government is going to wake up to those challenges."