We speak with investigative reporter Robert Dreyfuss and retired Pentagon official Karen Kwiatkowski about a secret Pentagon intelligence unit created weeks after 9/11 to push disinformation and faulty intelligence to create the case for war in Iraq.

As the U.S. occupation of Iraq extends into it eight month and into 2004, some 460 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq and thousands more have been wounded. U.S. forces have failed to produce any of mass destruction in the country — the stated reason for going to war against Baghdad.

A new investigation examines how a secret Pentagon intelligence unit led the nation to war by pushing disinformation and faulty intelligence to produce wildly exaggerated threats posed by Iraq. A detailed article in this month’s issue of Mother Jones reveals how just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration set up the secret Pentagon unit and war-planning task force named the Office of Special Plans. Today we take a look at The Lie Factory.

• Robert Dreyfuss, investigative reporter and contributing editor at Mother Jones, the Nation and American Prospect. His article The Lie Factory was just published in this month’s Mother Jones magazine.
• Karen Kwiatkowski, recently retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who served in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq. Her articles can be found at LewRockwell.com.