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Jane Mayer’s reporting on this issue can be found in Mayer, “The Manipulator,” p. 64.

89. Kwiatkowski is cited in Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, Benjamin Armbruster, and Matt Duss, “Iraq: Douglas Feith’s Blame Game,” The Progress Report , March 11, 2008, http://www.americanprogressaction.org/progressreport/2008/03/pr20080311.

90. Kwiatkowski, “The New Pentagon Papers,” p. 1. PBS’s 2005 Frontline special on “The Long Road to War,” http://www.pbs.org/

wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/longroad/etc/script.html, makes similar points.

91. Seymour Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” New Yorker , May 12, 2003, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact.

92. For Chalabi and the INC as core suppliers of intelligence, see: Kwiatkowski, “The New Pentagon Papers,” p. 3. Chalabi and his INC provided “intelligence” to Undersecretary of Defense (and Neocon core ally) Luti and Libby’s deputy (John Hannah), according to information from inside the INC itself. This was revealed in a 2002 letter from the Washington office of the INC to the Senate Appropriations Committee. Reported in Lang, “Drinking the Kool-Aid.”

For further confirmation that Ahmad Chalabi had a special relationship with the vice president’s office, see also Karen Kwiatkowski, “The New Pentagon Papers,” p. 1.

For Chalabi’s operation seen as providing questionable intelligence, see, for instance, former CIA officer Robert Baer in Jane Mayer, “The Manipulator,” p. 58, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/07/040607fa_fact1?currentPage=1.

93. The chummy relationship with Chalabi extended to designs for postwar Iraq, in which Chalabi was a ubiquitous figure. A senior State Department official reported about the Office of Special Plans that, “Every list of Iraqis they wanted to work with for positions in the government of postwar Iraq included Chalabi and all the members of his organization.” Mayer, “The Manipulator,” p. 58, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/07/040607fa_fact1?currentPage=1. For additional information on how the Counter Terrorism group acquired its intelligence, see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/interviews/maloof.html.

94. With regard to Maloof and Wurmser and the CTEG, see Risen, “How Pair’s Finding on Terror,” p. A1. Maloof also served as a deputy to Stephen Bryen in Reagan’s Pentagon (Lang, “Drinking the Kool-Aid”).

With regard to the pair’s findings, see Kwiatkowski, “The New Pentagon Papers,” p. 1; and PBS’s 2008 Frontline special on “Bush’s War” regarding the post-9/11 strategizing that went into planning for Iraq, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/etc/script.html.

95. With regard to Maloof meeting Perle in his home, see, for instance, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/us/how-pair-s-finding-on-terror-led-to-clash-on-shaping-intelligence.html?pagewanted=all. For Kwiatkowski quote, see Kwiatkowski, “The New Pentagon Papers,” p. 1. Kwiatkowski calls this commandeering of intelligence bodies by executive appointees in the Pentagon a “neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus” (Kwiatkowski, “The New Pentagon Papers,” p. 1).

The leaked report is marked: “NSC/OVP BREIFING (sic).” For the report, see http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2007/04/feithslides.pdf.

For further reference, see David Corn and Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006).

96. Jim Lobe, “POLITICS-U.S.: Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network,” Inter Press Service, August 7 2003, http://www.

ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=19565.

97. For 2007 IG finding on Office of Special Plans: The first quote here is from Deputy Inspector General for Intelligence, Review of the Pre-Iraqi War Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Inspector General, United States Department of Defense, Report No. 07-INTEL-04 , February 9, 2007, Review, p. 4. In fall 2005 Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), then chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, requested the report (Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith, “Official’s Key Report on Iraq is Faulted,” Washington Post , February 9, 2007, p. A1, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/08/AR2007020802387.html).

The second quote is from Deputy Inspector General for Intelligence, Review of the Pre-Iraqi War Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy , p. 34.

For Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 2004 finding that the unit exaggerated the Iraqi threat, see executive summary from the office of Inspector General referring to this report at: http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/ig020907-decl.pdf. For June 2008 report, see Press Release of Intelligence Committee, “Senate Intelligence Committee Unveils Final Phase II Reports on Prewar Iraq Intelligence—Two Bipartisan Reports Detail Administration Misstatements on Prewar Iraq Intelligence, and Inappropriate Intelligence Activities by Pentagon Policy Office,” http://intelligence.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=298775.

For quote from Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report: According to a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “when the analytical judgments of the intelligence community did not conform to the more conclusive and dire administration views of Iraqi links to al-Qaeda . . . policymakers within the Pentagon denigrated the intelligence community’s analysis and sought to trump it by circumventing the CIA and briefing their own analysis directly to the White House.” The Senate report also notes that in a communication sent to Wolfowitz and Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld regarding a CIA report that failed to establish a convincing connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Feith’s people recommended that the “CIA’s interpretation ought to be ignored.” Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the intelligence committee, said in a news conference that Feith’s “private intelligence” operation was “not lawful.” (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq,” July 7, 2004, p. 457, section containing the “additional views” of Senators John Rockefeller, Carl Levin, and Richard Durbin.)

For conclusions of the inspector general, see Deputy Inspector General for Intelligence, Review of Pre-Iraqi War Activities.

98. For information on the cross agency clique, see Jim Lobe, “U.S.: Ex-Pentagon Aide Hits ‘Deceit’ and ‘Subversion’ on Iraq,” InterPress Service, August 5, 2003.

Regarding Abrams: In posts that did not require congressional approval, Abrams served as special assistant to the President and senior director for Near East and North African Affairs from 2002 to 2009; deputy assistant to the President and deputy national security advisor for Global Democracy Strategy from 2005 to 2009; and senior director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations from 2001 to 2002.

Kwiatkowski is cited in Jim Lobe, “Insider Fires a Broadside at Rumsfeld’s Office,” Asia Times , 7 August 2003, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EH07Ak01.html.

99. See, for instance, author’s interview with Paul Pillar, June 10, 2009.

100. John Judis, The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (New York: Scribner, 2004), p. 169.

101. Weisman, Prince of Darkness: Richard Perle , p. 175.

102. Author’s interview with Lawrence B. Wilkerson, June 12, 2009.

103. Holly Yeager, “Of All Things: Power Behind the Throne—Eleana Benador,” Financial Times , August 9, 2003.