This long article
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/politics/28INTE.html
is very worth reading if you're an Office of Special Plans fan. It's very good. It turns out the Office of Special Plans came later. These guys were the real beginning. The article has a very clear time and detailed timeline of how it was all made up.
On the humor side, I just wanted to point out two things about the first two paragraphs. One is that the "terrorist network" these guys presumed was out there and then projected on the world is essentially the same "international terrorist network" that Claire Sterling invented in a book by that name at the beginning of the Reagan era: the idea that behind all the disparate terrorist groups in the world were a series of rogue states, and behind all them was the Soviet empire -- that all the huge differences in ideology and background were all mere appearances to be seen through until you got to the underlying truth of the worldwide communist conspiracy. (Sterling's "Bulgarian conspiracy to kill the Pope" that Doug mentioned last week was simply this theory applied two years later. Amusing as it now sounds, it accused the Reagan administration of a covering up these obvious connections (of the Turkish pope attacker to the Bulgarian secret police to the Kremlin) because it was too married to detente and didn't want this plot to disrupt it. The ability of these people to project conspiracies against themselves knows no bounds.) And it's not an accident that the Sterling framework lives. The international terrorist conspiracy has been the neocon's chief foreign policy theory ever since they emerged as significant foreign policy-makers in teh first year of Reagan's first term.
The second thing is that the image of Maloof and Wurmser in a windowless room covering the walls with butcher paper to map out their conspiracy reminds me of nothing so much as the image of Russell Crowe/John Nash in _A Beautiful Mind_.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/politics/28INTE.html
The New York Times April 28, 2004
How Pair's Finding on Terror Led to Clash on Shaping Intelligence
By JAMES RISEN
W ASHINGTON, April 27 Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, a two-man
intelligence team set up shop in a windowless, cipher-locked room at
the Pentagon, searching for evidence of links between terrorist groups
and host countries.
The men culled classified material, much of it uncorroborated data
from the C.I.A. "We discovered tons of raw intelligence," said Michael
Maloof, one of the pair. "We were stunned that we couldn't find any
mention of it in the C.I.A.'s finished reports."
They recorded and annotated their evidence on butcher paper hung like
a mural around their small office. By the end of the year, as the
rubble was being cleared from the World Trade Center and United States
forces were fighting in Afghanistan, the men had constructed a
startling new picture of global terrorism.
Old ethnic, religious and political divides between terrorist groups
were breaking down, the two men warned, posing an ominous new threat.
Rest at: URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/politics/28INTE.html