WASHINGTON, 1 April 2004 — A blistering report details an elaborate network of how a secret Pentagon unit, established shortly after Sept. 11, and led by neoconservative ideologues, “mischaracterized and exaggerated intelligence to build the Bush administration’s case for war.”

Mother Jones magazine, which provides a leftist analysis not usually found in mainstream media (www.MotherJones.com) exposes shocking revelations of a deliberate misuse of power to prejudice administration policy.

To summarize, MJ says false reports about Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began “almost as soon as the Bush administration took power.”

“Long before 9/11, even before the Bush team at the Pentagon had been formally installed — even before Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, and Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy arrived, it began putting together what would become the front for regime change in Iraq.”

“Both Wolfowitz and Feith have deep roots in the neoconservative movement,” writes MJ, adding that Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between US and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries’ future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the Untied States as a force for “regime change” in the region.

These men called in longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam, to help organize the Iraq war-planning team. Rhode helped Feith establish the department’s new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation, says MJ.

The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith and Rhode was the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank where Richard Perle, “godfather of the AEI-Defense Department nexus of neo-conservatives was chairman of the Pentagon’s influential Defense Policy Board.”

Just after 9/11, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.

Wurmser became the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith’s office; it was the nucleus of the Defense Department’s Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, continues MJ.

In 1996, Wurmser wrote a paper calling on Israel to work with Jordan and Turkey to “contain, destabilize and roll back” various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan and restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a “prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria’s territorial integrity.”

As the momentum for war began to build in early 2002, MJ says Wolfowitz and Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric “Office of Special Plans,” or OSP; the new unit’s director was Abram Shulsky. “For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only oversaw war plans but also acted aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House.”

“Staff working for Shulsky in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style intelligence,” notes MJ.

Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have said they were pressured to shape intelligence to fit policy. “The Al-Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issues were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the US,” Thielmann told the New York Times. “And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things.”

“It has become excruciatingly clear just how wrong US intelligence was in regard to Iraqi weapons and support for terrorism,” writes MJ.

The American teams of inspectors in the Iraq Survey Group, which employed 1,400 people to scour the country and analyze the findings, did not find a shred of evidence.