Wolfowitz Committee Instructed White House To Use Iraq/Uranium Reference

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'They see themselves as outsiders,' a former C.I.A. expert who spent the past decade immersed in Iraqi-exile affairs said of the Special Plans people. 'There's a high degree of paranoia,' he told Hersh. 'They've convinced themselves that they're on the side of angels, and everybody else in the government is a fool.'

By last fall, the White House had virtually dismissed all of the intelligence on Iraq provided by the CIA, which failed to find any evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, in favor of the more critical information provided to the Bush administration by the Office of Special Plans

Hersh reported that the Special Plans Office 'developed a close working relationship with the (Iraqi National Congress), and this strengthened its position in disputes with the C.I.A. and gave the Pentagon's pro-war leadership added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the I.N.C. to officials in the White House.'

In a rare Pentagon briefing recently, Office of Special Plans co-director Douglas Feith said the committee was not an 'intelligence project,' but rather a group of 18 people that looked at intelligence information from a different point of view.

Feith said when the group had new 'thoughts' on intelligence information it was given; they shared it with CIA director Tenet.

'It was a matter of digesting other people's intelligence,' Feith said of the main duties of his group. 'Its job was to review this intelligence to help digest it for me and other policy makers, to help us develop Defense Department strategy for the war on terrorism.'

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