|
Institutional
Affiliations
Project
for the New American Century: Participant, "Rebuilding
America's Defenses" (3)
Rand Corporation: Researcher/author (1, 2)
National Strategy Information Center: Fellow (2, 4)
Government
Service
Defense Department: Director, Office of Special Plans (1)
Senate Intelligence Committee: Former staffer (1)
Defense
Department: Served under then-Assistant Secretary of Defense
Richard Perle during the Reagan administration (1)
Education
University of Chicago: Ph.D. (1972) (1)
|
Highlights
& Quotes
Abram
Shulsky, a Leo
Strauss scholar and intelligence expert associated with the
Project for the New American Century, is best known for his work
in the Office of Special Plans, a secretive intelligence outfit
in the Pentagon that was charged with digging up information on
Iraq that would support the administration's arguments for going
to war. According to an expose by the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh,
the Office of Special Plans, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz
and began its work soon after the 9/11 terrorists attacks, "has
brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence
community. These advisers and analysts . . . have produced a skein
of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion
and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by
other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by
the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by
Ahmad Chalabi." (1)
By late 2002, says Hersh, the Office of Special Plans had overshadowed the C.I.A. and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., and become Bush's main intelligence source on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and on Hussein's alleged Al Qaeda connections. Hersh continues, "Although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question. The director of the Special Plans operation is Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Shulsky has been quietly working on intelligence and foreign-policy issues for three decades; he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early nineteen-eighties and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration, after which he joined the Rand Corporation. The Office of Special Plans is overseen by Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti, a retired Navy captain. Luti was an early advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the Administration moved toward war and policymaking power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities." (1)
W. Patrick Lang, a former Middle East expert at the DIA, told Hersh, "The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government's foreign policy, and they've pulled it off. They're running Chalabi. The DIA has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there's no guts at all in the CIA." (1)
Shulsky
arrived at the Office of Special Plans armed with his own unique
perspective on the value and purpose of intelligence. In 2002,
Shulsky coauthored with Gary
Schmitt, the director of the Project for the New American Century,
Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, which argued
that "truth is not the goal" of intelligence operations,
but "victory." (5)
The
two also coauthored The Future of U.S. Intelligence, a report published
by the hardline National Strategy Information Center that foreshadowed
the work of the Office of Special Plans. The report concluded that
intelligence should not be centralized in the CIA, and that the
intelligence community should adopt new methodology aimed at "obtaining
information others try to keep secret and penetrating below the
'surface' impression created by publicly available information to
determine whether an adversary is deceiving us or denying us key
information." It recommended creating "competing analytic
centers" with "different points of view" that could
"provide policymakers better protection against new 'Pearl
Harbors,' i.e., against being surprised." (6)
|
