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David Wurmser

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Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, in their January 26, 2004, ''Mother Jones''' article [http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/iraq/1448.html "The Lie Factory"], write:
:"Just after [[September 11, 2001]], [[Douglas Feith]] and [[Harold Rhode]] recruited '''David Wurmser''', the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.
:"Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington. While the [[CIA]] and other intelligence agencies concentrated on [[Osama bin Laden]]'s [[Al Qaeda]] as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, [[Paul D. Wolfowitz]] and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. ...In short, Wurmser, backed by Feith and Rhode, set out to prove what didn't exist."
:"In an administration devoted to the notion of 'Feith-based intelligence,' Wurmser was ideal. For years, he'd been a shrill ideologue, part of the minority crusade during the 1990s that was beating the drums for war against Iraq. Along with Perle and Feith, in 1996 Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav, wrote a provocative strategy paper for Israeli prime minister [[Benjamin Netanyahu]] called 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.' It called on Israel to work with Jordan and Turkey to 'contain, destabilize and roll back' various states in the region, overthrow [[Saddam Hussein]] in [[Iraq]], press Jordan to restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a 'prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity.'
:"In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called 'Iraq Needs a Revolution' and the next year co-signed a letter with Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the [[Iraqi National Congress]] (INC), an exile group led by [[Ahmad Chalabi]], in promoting an insurgency in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote 'Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein', essentially a book-length version of 'A Clean Break' that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith."