Soob

Munz sent this along a few days ago:

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator...

I'd encourage you to read the entire article.

All obvious and alleged political conclusions aside (the rather shady nature of the Bush admin, for instance) this is an intriguing article when looked at in terms of the xGW framework. The misinformation provided (especially that bit about screwing up traffic [???] as a precursor for coup) would seem to focus entirely on disrupting the "victims" (in this case Ledeen and the above mentioned "cabal") ability to correctly observe the situation at hand. Consider the tdaxp diagram below that quite effectively links the various gradients (see post and commentary here) of warfare to how they focus upon and disrupt each cognitive step laid out in the infamous OODA loop:

Just as interesting is the idea that Ghorbanifar's apparent misinformation also served to toss a much larger 4GWish wrench into the decision making process of the Defense Department in a rather top down approach with Donald Rumsfeld halting the counter intelligence investigation. This effectively killed not only the investigation at hand but also, one presumes, any nascent plots to overthrow the Iranian regime that were brewing as a result of that misinformation. Two birds with one multigradient stone.