Vice Squad

Background the Vice President's Office and their hand in the false intellegence gathering efforts leading up to Iraq.

The pivotal role of Cheney’s staff in promoting war in Iraq has been well documented. Cheney was the war’s most vocal advocate, and his staff -- especially Libby, Hannah, Ravich, and others -- worked hard to “fit” intelligence to inflate Iraq’s seeming threat. William J. Luti, a neoconservative radical, left Cheney’s office for the Pentagon in 2001, where he organized the war planning team called the Office of Special Plans. David Wurmser, another neoconservative from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), joined the Pentagon to found the forerunner of the OSP, the so-called Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which then manufactured the evidence that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were allies. To that end, Wurmser worked closely with Hannah, Libby, Luti, and Harold Rhode, a Defense Department official in Andy Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment. Ravich, along with Zalmay Khalilzad, a neoconservative Middle East analyst and now U.S. ambassador to Iraq, worked hard to build the Iraqi National Congress–linked opposition forces under Ahmad Chalabi. Libby and Hannah produced key propaganda for the war, including the most inflammatory and inaccurate speeches delivered by Cheney and Bush. The Libby-Hannah team also authored a 48-page speech for Colin Powell’s 2003 United Nations appearance so extreme that Powell trashed the entire document. That version has never been released.

American Prospect

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