Chapomatic

Who is it they’re talking about here? Do I know the guy? Is it BS?

DoD Response to CBS Report

NEWS RELEASE from the United States Department of Defense

No. 838-04

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Aug 28, 2004

Media Contact: (703)697-5131

Public/Industry Contact: (703)428-0711

DoD Response to CBS Report

DoD has been cooperating with the Department of Justice on this matter

for an extended period of time. It is the DoD understanding that the investigation

within the DoD is limited in its scope.

I am curious as all get out to see what is up. From New York Times:

The espionage investigation has focused on an official who works in the office of Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, officials who have been briefed about the investigation said. The F.B.I. has gathered evidence that the official passed classified policy documents to officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a major pro-Israeli lobbying group, which in turn provided the information to Israeli intelligence, the officials said.

The bureau has evidence that the Pentagon official has given the Israelis a sensitive report about American policy toward Iran, along with other materials, the officials said.

Several government officials identified the official who was under investigation, but he could not be immediately reached for comment about the accusations.

Neither the official under suspicion nor anyone else associated with the case has been arrested, the officials said. Government officials suggested Friday that investigators were seeking the cooperation of the Pentagon official being investigated.

And for another “whiskey tango” question: why do we know this?

Update: Lex calls me out on an imprecision in my post. I wasn’t intending to question the timing of the announcement. I’m much more interested in why the story was broken in the first place. Why and who? What game advantages does this give to various players?

One “who” is known: Allah points us to the who. As I feared, I know the office–although don’t recognize the name; I might have met the guy once, if that. The other “whos”–who leaked the investigation, who else may be involved–is unknown to me at this point.

Now on to a tangential point that fills in some context for everybody. The office in which this guy supposedly works got a lot of flak during the buildup to the Iraq war because it was supposedly “Evil Neocon Central”. One female Air Force officer was so freaked she wrote a Nation article about how “evil” they were. On the other hand, I know some of the folks in that office and they were good people doing good work, so I’m a little skeptical. I had seen some rather, um, lively discussions. Some of them, due to tempers and impolitic discussion style, were unneccessarily so.

I wasn’t happy to see people so angry at the time–but on further reflection, considering the stakes a little yelling is probably good. We’ve seen polite senior personnel before. If you’re going to go to war, the stakes are high enough that people should be resigning if they’re that much in disagreement, people should be as forceful and persuasive as possible in support of the right decision. If we went to war on what I considered a bad set of criteria or bad information, I would be pretty darn motivated to be as forceful in my argument as ethics allow, not just as decorum allows. If we didn’t go to war and I saw that as a bad decision in a decision-making position, same same. (Once the decision’s made, you shut up and execute if you’re the guy with the guns. That’s much different.)

Check DisInfopedia for details about the office from the left side if you like, but consider the source. Warning, spin at link can cause you to get hit with a flying moonbat, sources carefully chosen to give one viewpoint only. (Example: the Air Force retiree’s article talks about an office working like a “machine” and “filtering viewpoints”–well, on my ship I have to have a team working like a machine, and suppress spurious viewpoints like an unfounded “the ship isn’t safe” rumor from some clueless E-5′s spouse.) Otherwise the mission isn’t achieveable. Better information is more like this here:

Q: Thank you. I’m Ann Kahn from American University. If the prewar intelligence on Iraq was so uniform and so consistent in its findings as you’ve stated in your prepared remarks, why was it necessary to set up a special office of strategic planning within the Defense Department, and does that office still exist? And if not, why not?

Feith: I’m delighted that you asked that question.

Moderator: I almost believe that. {Laughter}.

Feith: No, I am, because this is a subject of such thoroughgoing misinformation that it’s nice to have a chance to say something true about it. First of all, the Office of Special Plans that you referred to has nothing really whatsoever to do with intelligence it is one of the regional offices in the policy organization. We have regional offices for Latin America and Africa and Asia. We had – it is the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs. It was created in the fall of 2002 when we had to beef up our staff to handle all of the extra Iraq related work. We needed to increase it by something like 18 people. So we created a new office, and since there was an enormous amount of attention on the Pentagon, on what we were doing and are we planning for war and the creation of a new office that would have been called the Iraq office would have probably in and of itself created headlines. We chose the kind of name that the government gives to offices throughout the government that’s kind of nondescript – you know, “special plans,” long-range plans” – that kind of thing and it’s been grist for the conspiracy mongers ever since. But you referred to some intelligence unit, as many press reports did, confuse it with the special plans office. The so-called intelligence unit that was much discussed – it was two people, it was two people who did a project for about – it as not a unit, it was not an office. It was two people. And they did a project for about three months, and then another two people did a follow-on project for about 6 or 7 months.

It’s rather amazing that there have been numerous stories that said this was the Pentagon’s effort to replace the CIA and I can assure you that we do not hold the CIA in such low regard that we think we could replace them with two people. And in fact we think we – what those people did in that so-called intelligence unit that has been written about, was simply help me read and absorb the intelligence produced by the intelligence community, the CIA and other members of the intelligence community. So all I can say is there is, as I said, so much misinformation on this subject that I would urge everybody to treat with great skepticism what you read on that subject.

or here:

REP. SUSAN A. DAVIS (D-CA): Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to all of you for being here.

I had a follow-up, actually, on my colleague’s question. In our discussion that we had — (laughs) — for about three hours with the commission we didn’t really touch on one of the areas of intelligence that I think is — maybe it’s kind of the elephant in the room. I’m not sure. But the Office of Special Plans that was developed within the Pentagon some time ago and was kind of reinvigorated, I guess you might say. And perhaps you can clarify that for me, because I would appreciate kind of your take on that. Where does that fit in your thinking in the work that we’re doing now? I know that we all have great concerns about the management of information, and I think that we all want to be very careful that that management of information gets to the war fighter. But the management of policy is I — you know, it’s been stated earlier, a different issue. Could you clarify the Office of Special Plans? Is that operative today? For what do you rely on that group? What kind of information do you rely on them to present, and why do we need that, or why have we utilized it in the past?

MR. WOLFOWITZ: I’ll try — I mean, we’re talking not about the elephant in the room, but the flea. I mean, we’re talking about two people. And actually — you used this phrase “office of special plans.” That was actually a phrase used to describe the office that was doing Iraq planning back in a period when we were trying to be relatively discreet about it.

But what you’re really referring to is the two individuals who were asked by Undersecretary Doug Feith to look at this mass of intelligence information on terrorism and see what patterns they could discern in it. They didn’t generate intelligence, they didn’t do intelligence assessments, but they went mining information. And I would think, in fact, that hopefully we would see more ability of different organizations to look at the same body of information and, as General Pace said, to look at different ways of viewing it.

I think the 9/11 commission actually correctly called for more competitive analysis and pointed out — I think their phrase was “failure of imagination”; that if you get everything going through a single needle head and only one view that’s accepted, you’re much more likely, I think, to have a sort of groupthink that produces — looks at the information that is available to everybody but looks at it through a single lens.

The main point is we’re talking about two individuals who were simply looking at the intelligence collected by our huge intelligence community, and I think their role has been just enormously exaggerated. It’s a kind of urban legend.

REP. S. DAVIS: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. It may be an urban legend, but I think there still are concerns about what we do to really protect the professionalism of our analysts and whether or not that information that’s coming forward — it’s not so much, I think, connecting the dots as much as perhaps disregarding some of the dots, perhaps. And I agree with you, I think we need a competition of ideas and we need to ensure that that’s available to whoever and whatever kind of organization has — the overall entity that we’re talking about here, but I wanted to just have your response on that. I appreciate it.

I don’t know anything special; just have Google. I am going to shut my fat mouth on this subject for a good long while once this post is done. Suffice it to say that some people have a powerful grudge for some people in this office, and there’s a lot of fascinating misinformation out there feeding that grudge. For that reason I wonder a little more about this latest plot twist. Maybe it’s irrelevant. Maybe not.