REVEALED - the inside story on the Office Of Special Powers...

In the aftermath of 9/11, an agency, known as the Office of Special Plans (OSP) was set up by the defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The agency was stacked with un-elected, un-qualified, temporary "consultants". They including like-minded lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in the US capital. Few had experience in intelligence.

Led by hawks like Cheney, Gingrich and Wolfowitz, the OSP picked and chose the intelligence they wanted, ignoring or completely by-passing the CIA, FBI and others. They also had direct links with Israel's Likud party, bypassing Mossad intelligence. At one stage there was over a hundred of them.

"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre."

As US Congress holds closed-doors discussions of intelligence failures, the UK Guardian newspaper provides this in-depth look at the workings of the OSP. The damning conclusion:

"The world's sole superpower risks stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to distinguish real threats from phantoms."