The Lie Factory

The Lie Factory
By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's
Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq,
observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories
about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence, -- it was
propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick
it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context,
often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong
together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for
U.S. officials, -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and
Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony
at the U.N. Security Council last February, -- that the administration pushed
American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.

Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly
exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in
full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based
on dozens of interviews, -- some on the record, some with officials who
insisted on anonymity, -- exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon
intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the
Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who
spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used
the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feat...01/12_405.html