Talk:Office of Special Plans

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I read with interest this week that senior Democratic congressmen are finally looking into the OSP and the way intelligence actually came from the defense department, Cheney, and Scooter Libby as opposed to the CIA, which is falling on a huge sword to save face for the current administration.

NPOV Tag

I am putting an NPOV tag on this article. It seems like there is no balance at all in the coverage (i.e. nothing said to counterbalance any of the charges made and no one refuting any of the charges). Even the article sections seem to violate WP:NPOV, as they slant negatively. I had actually never heard of this program before reading the article here, so I am not sure how prominent it was, but I will try to find some sources. Fundamentaldan 17:13, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Some things are simply not disputed. The OSP was designed to do an end-run around the normal intel process, and there really hasn't been much defense of the organization, especially recently. I'm all for adding a defense of the org from Perle or Feith or whoever, but the fact is that the consensus of commentators has had significant problems with the organization, for obvious reasons. I don't think we should introduce phony balance in order to satisfy npov concerns when the facts are that the organization has been extremely problematic. If you have suggestions for specific changes to make this less POV, indicate what they are; otherwise, the npov tag should not be used. csloat 18:43, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

As I said previously, I am not too familiar with this subject. However, a cursory search on Fox News turned up this story: Pentagon Official Denies Manipulating Evidence and a Google search turns up this one: [1]. It appears that there is another side of this story, and this other side should be included. According to that article, Mr. Feith disputes the way this office was interpreted. It is not about having a phony balance, it is about representing conflicting points of view fairly. As it stands right now, the article declares the one point of view as the truth and uses weasel words as well. I will take a look at fixing it tomorrow, after I have had time to read these sources. But, I think the NPOV tag should stay. Also, even your reply to me shows you have a strong point of view about the subject. That is fine, but articles are to be written from neutral point of view, and this article is not yet there, IMHO. Fundamentaldan 22:28, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree, if Feith has a notable response to critics, it should be included. As for whether I have a strong POV on the topic, all I can say is that I actually do have a familiarity with the topic and I have read quite a bit of information about it, and I don't see that the article overstates or biases the case in any significant way. Feith probably does defend the organization, but the consensus of experts and policymakers do not, and in fact the SSCI found evidence to support the criticism. It is also notable that an Israeli spy was working out of this office, likely with Feith's knowledge, and that the most recent DCI explicitly chastised the OSP's approach in sworn testimony. There is certainly a lot that could be added to this article, and Feith's own explanation should be included as well, but we should not pretend that this is a debate with two equal sides. Almost everyone disagrees with Feith. csloat 23:37, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

The Pentagon IG report pretty much confirms what I've been saying. Since you don't appear to have a specific POV objection, I am going to remove the POV tag. If you feel the need to restore it, please indicate exactly what needs to change in order to get the tag removed. thanks. csloat 21:34, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry it took me so long to respond, Commodore. I think the article is good as edited. It seems to be less POV than before. I might look it over again if I get some time later. Thanks. Fundamental Dan 16:30, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

NPOV II

I added the tag again. This is the first time I've heard or seen this article and I must say I am shocked. This is one of the most unbalanced articles at Wikipedia. There are absolutely no counterpoints or opposing opinions here. And the article relies mostly on the far left website Raw Story and two well-known critics of the administration. --Jayzel 05:07, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Also, the header titles are extremely loaded and there is almost nothing telling me what the "office of special plans" is. This article is just a list of complaints made against the office. And there is the appearance of Original research in the way these allegations are strung together into a whole. --Jayzel 05:21, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Correct the problems that you see. If you find any balanced defenses of OSP feel free to add them. The problem is that there really aren't many. I imagine the mafia article and the al Qaeda articles could also be considered one-sided or unbalanced. Phony "balance" should not supercede accuracy. csloat 12:25, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

I'll be looking into the issue when I get some time in the next couple of days. --Jayzel 17:22, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Reading through the article, I think the POV tag is absolutely correct. The article should start with a neutral, encyclopedic paragraph about OSP's history, or its function. Instead, it starts with an extremely negative quote. In fact, there is never a good description of the group's origins or its function, all you get is negative quote after negative quote. Adding sources with a different POV isn't going to improve the article, it will just turn it into a quotefarm. What's needed is a rewrite that relies on relatively-neutral secondary sources. A good idea of what I'm talking about is the description of OSP in George Packer's The Assassin's Gate. Packer is no fan of OSP but he manages to explain the topic without bludgeoning you over the head with how terrible OSP was. GabrielF 20:33, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

If people don't understand what it is from the intro, that surely should be fixed. And I think this article could benefit from a history section. I'm not about presenting everything as if it was 50/50 -- that's not "balance", that's artifice; as if there's a 50% probability that "intelligent design" is science, simply because some fringe viewpoints exists, that contradicts wikipedia's "balance" policy. As regards intelligence gathering, the OSP was, as far as the information that's out there is concerned (whether for or against), radical in it's methodology. I don't think that same methodology should be followed on wikipedia. We should certainly include things that are interesting and important. And we should make clear to the reader what the OSP is. The OSP is an office that was set up to create intelligence assessments of a specific topic and nature, independantly of the CIA, and whose assessments were at odds with that of the CIA's. Kevin Baas^talk 01:02, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

The POV tag is unwarranted. I'll admit the following: Does the article leave the typical reader with the impression that Feith and Rumsfled are at best unintelligent, and at worst malevolent? Yes, I concede that it does. In my POV, and probably most people's, the actions described are the actions of the unintelligent and of the malevolent.

But, that is not relevant to the discussion! The article describes events and actions that actually occurred and tells us who did them. What happened and who did it are entirely within the scope of a neutral/omnicient/non-judgemental point of view.

It is the reader's personal business whether their POV is offended or affirmed by an accurate attestation of the facts. But it is the expressed mission of wikipedia to report them. I'm removing the tag. Triggtay 17:08, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

After re-reading this discussion page, I get the impression that both Kevin baas and I didn't really address the concerns that were raised by GabrielF, namely his concern that this article could be much "drier", so to speak, in it's account. As the article currently stands, there are negative quotes from the the Pentagon Inspector general's report, a democratic senator, and an NSA director. Statements from the pentagon inspector general's report should certainly be included in the article. I would think that an NSA boss's opinion before congress is also a useful inclusion, but perhaps not as a lengthy quote. As for the democratic senator's, i don't see how it adds any content of value since it is the predictable opinion of a member of the opposition political party.

On the flipside, there is also an armload of quotes from Feith just spinning away, talking about how great the OSP was without actually adding any new information, just his opinion that a project that he directed was worthwhile--which we would already have assumed he would say since it was a project that he directed. Does Douglas Feith's proclamation that the OSP constitutes "good government" really tell us anything new about the OSP? He probably knows more about how the OSP functioned than anyone else in the world, if he ever shares anything that actually tells us something new, it should certainly be included. The current Feith quotes don't really add much, and I think they should be trimmed down.Triggtay 17:57, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Are you being serious? You think it's wrong for Feith to have 5 short sentences giving his side of the issue in an article that begins with these loaded quotes from non-relevant Bush critics?

In an interview with the Scottish Sunday Herald, former CIA officer Larry C. Johnson said the OSP was "dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace. [The OSP] lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated." (Mackay, 2003)

Seymour Hersh writes that, according to an unnamed Pentagon adviser, "[OSP] was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons (WMD) that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States. [...] 'The agency [CIA] was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,' the Pentagon adviser told me. 'That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.' The goal of Special Plans, he said, was 'to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see.'" (Hersh, 2003) --Jayzel 15:10, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I guess my eyes skipped everything that was caught between the first headline and the "original research" tag...I agree, the pejoratives come out swinging before you even get to know what this article is about. Triggtay 20:10, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

It would indeed be useful to capture and report the official purpose of OSP, whether or not that purpose was ever faithfully acted upon. It would also be useful to report in some detail the actually findings of the OSP so that readers can make their own judgement as to whether the OSP really acted in good faith on what Feith claimed was its purpose. Seymour Hersch's article would of course indicate that OSP did not act on the purpose that Feith claimed. It would be useful to explore the relationship with Chalabi, whether any of the information that Chalabi provided the OSP was questioned or whether it was credible, and what the OSP did with that information. Particularly interesting because Chalabi, who remained in good favor with Feith, over time became persona non grata with the Bush 43 administration. In thinking about this discussion, I checked my recollection from reading the New York Times that Feith had resigned or been terminated, by reading part of an article that stated that he had resigned in a hurry once investigations started pointing their way to the OSP. It would be useful if someone knowledgeable could spell that out more. All of this goes to the credibility of Feith and others as sources of accurate information about the OSP. There has been a lot of what Marilyn B. Young (Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn From the Past) has called "deception" in the administration's statements in relation to the Iraq War (interview with Bill Moyers circa May 4, 2007). I agree that it is useful to include information from all sides, with the caveat that deceptive statements be identified as such. I also recognize that such treatment rapidly gets dicey, because the matter could prove to be the subject of Congressional investigation, and even legal action. On the other hand, if there are contributors who actually have sorted this through to the best of their ability, it would be outstanding if they could lay the information out for us at some length so that we can understand what is going on with Congressional reactions and perhaps legal reactions. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Carlfoss (talk • contribs) 01:26, 14 May 2007 (UTC).

Seriously deficient

This article is seriously deficient because it fails to describe what the OSP actually did beyond supplying raw intelligence on Iraq to the White House. I'm sure there are editors more familiar with this subject (Commodore Sloat? Pir?), but my understanding is that the mission of the OSP was to drum up post-9/11 support for war against Iraq. The article needs a whole new first section (after the lead) describing the OSP's activities and whether and how it accomplished its mission. Then the rest of the article can go into criticisms and illegality. But without the basic factual information, the article sadly reads as a non-neutral criticism ghetto. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 19:06, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

And reviewing other comments on this talk page, there's a clear consensus on this very issue. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 19:14, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

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