From Raw Story:
Those familiar with information provided to Fitzgerald say that shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Wurmser was handpicked by Harold Rhode, a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon "think tank," and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to head a top secret Pentagon "cell" whose job was to comb through CIA intelligence documents and find evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States and its neighbors in the Middle East so a case could be made to launch a preemptive military strike. Wurmser largely invented evidence that Iraq had close ties to Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, sources knowledgeable about his work told RAW STORY.
Although the CIA documents that Wurmser and his staff poured over never showed Iraq as being an immediate threat, Wurmser was dead set on finding and presenting evidence to Vice President Dick Cheney that suggested as much even if the veracity of such intelligence was questionable. Wurmser had met with now discredited Iraqi exiles who were part of the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmed Chalabi, the infamous single source of Judith Miller's explosive columns published in the New York Times that said Iraq was acquiring nuclear bomb components, who is now the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, sources close the probe said.
With the help of Chalabi, and the White House Iraq Group, Wurmser helped Cheney's office, particularly the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, build a case for war. Wurmser frequently met with Cheney, Libby, Feith and Richard Perle, the former head of the Defense Policy Board, to go over the "evidence" of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein that could then be used by the White House to build public support for the Iraq war. Wurmser routinely butted heads with the CIA over the veracity of the intelligence he was providing to Cheney's office, sources close the investigation said.
Wurmser had long been a proponent of removing Saddam Hussein from power. Indeed, in 1996, Wurmser, his wife Meyrav and Perle, authored a paper for "Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It called 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 to 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," according to an investigative report in the January/February 2004 issue of Mother Jones magazine.
They faked the intelligence, and now we know how and why...
-The Oklahoma Hippy
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