In August 2002, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas “Feith put together the Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the Pentagon. A larger, more powerful successor to the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group that Feith ran with [neoconservative scholar] David Wurmser and [Defense Department official] Michael Maloof, the OSP’s mission was to ferret out evidence that Saddam had close ties to Al-Qaeda and a huge stockpile of WMDs, including a nuclear weapons program, and as such posed a grave threat both to the region and to the United States. The existence of the OSP effectively meant that [Vice President Dick] Cheney, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld, and the neocons had declared war on the CIA by creating a bureaucratic operation whose sole purpose was to circumvent and subvert the nation’s statutorily authorized intelligence apparatus.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.]
– Craig Unger, The Fall of the House of Bush, Page 245