The Iraq Group

Update: The story originally posted to E&P WAS the story I refer to below from February of 2004. They’ve since removed it. The Sam Gardiner stuff is still interesting, however, as we contemplate the DSM’s — the other white meat.

Atrios links to this new E&P scoop that says the Plame Grand Jury just subpoenaed documents from the Iraq Group, which set off some bells. It turns out the Grand Jury has asked for documents from this group before and I wrote about it back in February of ’04. (Good to know I haven’t completely blown all my brain cells.)

Here’s what I wrote at the time. Looking at it now it takes on some unusual (although likely completely coincidental) significance:

According to Newsday(link now broken) today:

Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

So, it now turns out that the “Iraq Group,” the supervisory marketing arm of the Iraq march to war is in the sights of the Plame grand jury. Jim Wilkinson is the one member of the administration who is simultaneously a member of the OGC and the Iraq Group.

The thing to remember about both the OGC and the Iraq Group is that they are not just spin artists. They are propagandists. They were very involved with Alisdair Campbell in the “sexing up” of the WMD threat, so it will be very interesting to see if these documents are turned over without a lot of national security hoo-hah.

There is a big story in those documents, perhaps much bigger even than Plame, although the subpoenaes are only for July 2003 so they won’t reveal the really interesting stuff about the blatant WMD lies. Because, not to go into too much tin-foil hat territory, there is a very interesting story to be told about the unprecedented “PR” sell-job that the White House coordinated to convince the American (and British) people that Saddam was a “grave and gathering” danger.

Many of you have probably read the paper written by Sam Gardiner, the retired colonel who taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College ( in PDF here) in which he claims to have found more than 50 instances of demonstrably false stories planted in the press in the run up to the war and charges the OCG and the Iraq Group as the culprits. This overview of the paper, originally published in The Edge brings up something quite interesting that ties it into the Plame affair:

Colonel Sam Gardiner (USAF, Ret.) has identified 50 false news stories created and leaked by a secretive White House propaganda apparatus. Bush administration officials are probably having second thoughts about their decision to play hardball with former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Joe Wilson is a contender. When you play hardball with Joe, you better be prepared to deal with some serious rebound.

After Wilson wrote a critically timed New York Times essay exposing as false George W. Bush’s claim that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger, high officials in the White House contacted several Washington reporters and leaked the news that Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent.

Wilson isn’t waiting for George W. Bush to hand over the perp. In mid-October, the former ambassador began passing copies of an embarrassing internal report to reporters across the US. The-Edge has received copies of this document.

The 56-page investigation was assembled by USAF Colonel (Ret.) Sam Gardiner. “Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II” identifies more than 50 stories about the Iraq war that were faked by government propaganda artists in a covert campaign to “market” the military invasion of Iraq.

[…]

According to Gardiner, “It was not bad intelligence” that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, “It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war” that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner’s research lead him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant “stories of strategic influence” that were known to be false.

The Times of London described the $200-million-plus US operation as a “meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.”

The multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign run out of the White House and Defense Department was, in Gardiner’s final assessment “irresponsible in parts” and “might have been illegal.”

“Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to the right decisions,” Gardiner explains. Consequently, “Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.” For the first time in US history, “we allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs… [W]hat has happened is that information warfare, strategic influence, [and] strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of informing the peoples of our two democracies.”

So many secrets. Is it ever possible to keep things like this from unravelling eventually?

Thanks to commenter S who lifted this great 2003 Gore Vidal quote from Americablog:

Yet you saw in the ’60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with the discontent over how the war in Iraq is playing out, don’t you get the impression that Bush is headed for the same fate?

I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It’s often these small things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents. This resonates more than Iraq. I’m afraid that 90 percent of Americans don’t know where Iraq is and never will know, and they don’t care.

Yep. It’s often the little things, the sloppy things that trip them up. 3rd rate burglary. Pissant revenge for a critical op-ed. Dumb stuff. We don’t know if any of this will stick, it’s actually unlikely. But if something does, it will be something like this — Karl Rove personally involving himself in outing Valerie Plame because he was ticked off — and then lying to the FBI about it.

There’s a lot of speculation that this is a rat-fuck and it may be. But, I think that Karl’s playing very close to the edge if he’s doing this on purpose. He’s the guy who stands to get scalded if this grand Jury turns up something. Unless this entire investigation is a corrupt White House inside job (and you never know) it’s very risky. He’s a guy who takes risks, so he may have done this, but my guess is that in the summer of 2003, facing the firsrt real criticism of Bush’s presidency, he got mad and fucked up and he has been dog-paddling ever since, hoping it goes away.

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