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More on the Office of Special Plans, and its original core team of two, Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, [both proteges of Richard Perle], who saw hidden connections where the CIA and DIA did not.
When Mr. Perle was a top defense official in the Reagan administration, Mr. Maloof, a former journalist, worked as his investigator, assembling evidence that the Soviet Union was stealing Western technology. Mr. Wurmser, a Middle East expert who had written a book that attacked the Clinton administration and the C.I.A. for their handling of Iraq in the 1990's, had worked at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank where Mr. Perle was a resident scholar. Mr. Feith had been Mr. Perle's deputy at the Pentagon. And while they were all out of government, Mr. Wurmser, Mr. Feith and Mr. Perle had signed a 1996 paper calling for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein to enhance Israel's security.
...Each week, they would brief Stephen A. Cambone, then Mr. Feith's principal deputy. By November 2001, as the Bush administration began war planning for Iraq, the unit had produced a slide presentation that they were told would be used by Mr. Rumsfeld in a NATO meeting.
The team's conclusions were alarming: old barriers that divided the major Islamic terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, were coming down, and these groups were forging ties with one another and with secular Arab governments in an emerging terrorist war against the West.
Their analysis covered plenty of controversial ground. The two men identified members of the Saudi royal family who they said had aided Al Qaeda over the years. They warned that Al Qaeda had operatives in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where they were establishing ties with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. They suspected Abu Nidal, an aging Palestinian terrorist leader living in Baghdad, of being an indirect link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, even though many other analysts believed that he was essentially retired and that his once-fearsome organization had been shattered. Mr. Nidal died under mysterious circumstances in Baghdad in 2002.
The Pentagon conclusions were at odds with years of C.I.A. analysis. The agency was skeptical that governments as diverse as those in Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Iran could be linked to anything like a cohesive terrorist network. The C.I.A. and the D.I.A. believed that Feith's team had greatly exaggerated the significance of reported contacts among extremist groups and Arab states. The C.I.A. saw little evidence, for example, that the Sunni-dominated Qaeda and the Shiite-dominated Hezbollah had worked together on terrorist attacks.
And there was little proof that Mr. Hussein was working on terror plots with Mr. bin Laden, a religious extremist who viewed the Baghdad regime as a corrupt, secular enemy. "The divides do matter," a senior C.I.A. official said. "But if you work hard enough in this nasty world, you can link just about anybody to anybody else."
Perhaps even more controversial: that the Office of Special Plans began to collect raw, and what turned out to be false, "intelligence," directly from "defectors" provided by Ahmad Chalabi, rather than just analyze raw intelligence collected by other agencies.
At Mr. Maloof's request, Mr. Perle asked Mr. Chalabi, now a member of the interim government of Iraq, to have his staff provide Mr. Maloof information gleaned from defectors and others. The request was unusual, because Mr. Feith's analysts were supposed to review intelligence, not collect it. And Mr. Chalabi at that time had a lucrative contract to provide information on Iraq exclusively to the State Department, which would send it along to the intelligence agencies.
Mr. Maloof later met with member of the Iraqi National Congress's staff. As it turned out, Mr. Chalabi was a risky source: some of the information his group provided was incorrect or fabricated, intelligence officials now believe.
Mr. Wurmser now works for Dick Cheney, and Maloof has been suspended with pay, pending problems with his security clearance. [Wurmser's wife, an Israeli, heads an outfit called MEMRI which translates selected Arabic language media into English.]
Also interesting is the timing of this briefing the OSP team gave deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley and Cheney staffer Lewis Libby.
A few weeks later, on Sept. 16, 2002, Feith's team briefed Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, and I. Lewis Libby, a senior aide to Mr. Cheney. By that time, Mr. Cheney was already talking publicly about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. In an appearance on "Meet the Press" just before the first anniversary of 9/11, he said that even without evidence of direct involvement by Baghdad in the attacks, the Hussein regime may have supported Al Qaeda.
"New information has come to light," Mr. Cheney said. "And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the one hand, and the Al Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years.
But even as the Al Qaeda-Saddam link is not one the Bush White House ultimately insisted upon (although I agree with Juan Cole that the lack of established link was deliberately never effectively communicated by the White House), it was in this same few week period, around September 2002, that the administration was settling on a party line on how it would sell the war to the American public. And the selling point of course was that Iraq was pursuing acquisition of nuclear weapons.
As Feith tells the Times, "One question was: Was Iraq involved in 9/11? We found no hard link. What about Iraq-Al Qaeda links in general? Well, there were some, but that wasn't the essence of the Saddam Hussein threat. The danger of Saddam's providing W.M.D. to Al Qaeda or another terrorist group — there you had a real problem, because his record on W.M.D. was indisputable."
Post Script: Others have expressed dismay at why Risen reported this now -- it's not exactly news about the Office of Special Plans' effort to connect Al Qaeda with Saddam, etc. But I am endlessly hungry for every scrap of information about what the OSP was doing, and think Risen by playing it straight makes fools of them just the same. The fact that Feith is quoted above saying the Iraq has WMD charge was "indisputable" again highlights just how totally wrong about everything they were, and begs the question, why haven't these people lost their jobs?