From a reader, this excerpt from the Monday hearing with General John Batiste, former chief military advisor to then deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz. North Carolina Republican Walter Jones is asking Batiste about the creation of the office of special plans:

JONES: I want to start with you, General Batiste, if I may. You were at the Pentagon, I think you said you left in 2002, is that correct?

BATISTE: Yes, sir, in June of 2002.

JONES: OK, I'm sure from time to time you might have had the occasion to meet or to interact or to have coffee with General Newbold.

BATISTE: Yes, sir.

JONES: My bringing this up is because I am just...I don't want to live in the past, I think Col. Hammett said that, we've got to move forward, and General Eaton, obviously...but.

The American people have a right to know how and why we got into Iraq...the truth.

Knowing what General Newbold has also told me, uh, meeting with him, when y'all saw the Office of Special Plans being developed...because it wasn't there inititially...I think at some time it was developed to be an advisory to Secretary Rumsfeld, and I have recently met...I cannot use his name, because he's active duty in the military now...but I recently met with a gentleman who was assigned to Secretary Rodman's (?) staff.

And how and why this manipulation of the intelligence uh, it was somewhat, the professionals were sending the intelligence and it was being re-written by this Office of Special Plans, uh, were you and others...professionals...I mean, were you seeing something like red flags, you know, "what in the world is happening here?", I mean, what was your impression when you started seeing and finding out the role of the Office of Special Plans, as an advisor?

BATISTE: Uh, it was disturbing, sir. Uh, there was a..a sense within the Department of Defense that the CIA had it wrong, uh, and wasn't gonna get it right. Uh, there was a fixation to find the connection between, uh, al Qaeda, uh, and Saddam Hussein. It went on relentlessly.

And I believe, my opinion, that that's the reason why Secretary Rumsfeld stood up this other office, uh, very dangerous thing, I think, for a Democracy, when we count on the Director of Central Intelligence to be that, that central point where all the intelligence is gathered and analyzed and there's some judgements made...uh, suddenly there's lots of people doing this, cherry-picking whatever they want, and there's an old saying, uh, "Liars figure and figures lie". So I think that one could justify just about anything he or she wanted to if you go out...go at it with zeal and a little bit of gusto, and that's exactly what in my view happened.

Recording of it here. Secretary Rodman, you'll remember, is assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs Peter Rodman, the guy below undersecretary of defense for policy Eric Edelman. And what falls under Rodman in the massive DoD org chart? As I earlier reported, the new Pentagon Iranian directorate, which is de facto overseen by Abram Shulsky, a special advisor to Edelman, and the former director of the Office of Special Plans. As I reported yesterday, according to the recently released Senate Select Intel committee Phase II report on the INC, Rodman also introduced one of the INC defectors to the DIA who later turned out to be a fabricator on quite a scale. "Source Five" as he's referred to in the Senate report (.pdf, page 92) "claimed publicly that Osama bin Laden had come to Baghdad."

Posted by Laura at September 27, 2006 06:50 PM