In November 2001, Douglas Feith quietly set up the Office of Strategic Influence inside the Pentagon. The office was run by Brigadier General Simon P. Worden. In February 2002, the existence of the office was leaked and reported by the New York Times.

One of the office’s proposals calls for planting news items with foreign media organizations through outside concerns that might not have obvious ties to the Pentagon, officials familiar with the proposal said.

General Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from “black” campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to “white” public affairs that rely on truthful news releases, Pentagon officials said.

“It goes from the blackest of black programs to the whitest of white,” a senior Pentagon official said.
NYT: Common Dreams

The resulting global outrage was so searing that Rumsfeld was forced to announce that the OSI would be closed. Yet, as Rumsfeld later admitted, the mission of the office was merely divided up among other Pentagon agencies:

“And then there was the Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And “oh my goodness gracious isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.” I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.

That was intended to be done by that office is being done by that office, NOT by that office in other ways.”

Secretary Rumsfeld- Media Availability En Route to Chile, Monday, Nov. 18, 2002. Defense Link

That’s fairly clear, right?

:::flip:::
When the head of MI6 reported that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”, what might he have meant?

Might he have meant the Atta/Prague/Iraq connection?

Or might he have meant the Iraq/Niger connection?

Or might he have meant the Chalabi/Curveball connection?

Or might they have meant the Allawi phony memo incident:

Iraq’s coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.

Details of Atta’s visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

The handwritten memo, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by the Telegraph, is dated July 1, 2001 and provides a short resume of a three-day “work programme” Atta had undertaken at Abu Nidal’s base in Baghdad.

In the memo, Habbush reports that Atta “displayed extraordinary effort” and demonstrated his ability to lead the team that would be “responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy”.

The second part of the memo, which is headed “Niger Shipment”, contains a report about an unspecified shipment – believed to be uranium – that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.

Although Iraqi officials refused to disclose how and where they had obtained the document, Dr Ayad Allawi, a member of Iraq’s ruling seven-man Presidential Committee, said the document was genuine.

“We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam’s involvement with al-Qaeda,” he said. “But this is the most compelling piece of evidence that we have found so far. It shows that not only did Saddam have contacts with al-Qaeda, he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks.”

Although Atta is believed to have been resident in Florida in the summer of 2001, he is known to have used more than a dozen aliases, and intelligence experts believe he could easily have slipped out of the US to visit Iraq.

Yes, you read that correctly. And Bill Safire was the only major American journalist with so little personal integrity to repeat this obviously false story.

So, why should we believe anything the Pentagon says, or doubt that the OSI’s mission has been carried out with great gusto?

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