|
This sabre-rattling Bush is doing with Iran is all too familiar. I wonder why intelligence reports are being delayed to supposedly show certain links with Iran?:
| quote: | The Bush administration has postponed plans to offer public details of its charges of Iranian meddling inside Iraq amid internal divisions over the strength of the evidence, U.S. officials said.
U.S. officials promised last week to provide evidence of Iranian activities that led President Bush to announce Jan. 10 that U.S. forces would begin taking the offensive against Iranian agents who threatened Americans.
But some officials in Washington are concerned that some of the material may be inconclusive and that other data cannot be released without jeopardizing intelligence sources and methods. They want to avoid repeating the embarrassment that followed the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, when it became clear that information the administration cited to justify the war was incorrect, said the officials, who described the internal discussions on condition of anonymity.
"We don't want a repeat of the situation we had when [then-Secretary of State] Colin L. Powell went before the United Nations," said one U.S. official, referring to Powell's 2003 presentation on then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons program that relied on evidence later found to be false. "People are going to be skeptical."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...-home-headlines |
A recent attack that was originally being blamed on Iranian influence is likely something quite different:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,249403,00.html
Just remember something:
| quote: | the consensus within the intelligence community in 2002 [was:] that Iraq's ties with Al Qaeda were inconsequential; that its nuclear weapons program was minimal at best; and that its chemical and biological weapons programs, which had yielded significant stocks of dangerous weapons in the past, may or may not have been ongoing -
http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i...rmanjudis063003 |
But that didn't stop us looking, which is fine in of itself:
| quote: | "We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq," a CIA official recalled. "We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock." Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming--wrongly--were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government's top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)
The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs. Task force officers sent reports detailing the denials into the CIA bureaucracy. The defectors were duds--fabricators and embellishers. (JTFI officials came to suspect that some had been sent their way by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that desired a US invasion of Iraq.) The results were frustrating for the officers. Were they not doing their job well enough--or did Saddam not have an arsenal of unconventional weapons? Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the possibility that their small number of operations was, in a way, coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam's WMDs because the weapons did not exist. Still, she and her colleagues kept looking. (She also assisted operations involving Iran and WMDs.)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060918/corn |
By "she", Corn means Valerie Plame - the CIA covert operative that was deliberately outed by Cheney, Rove, and Libby.
But all this didn't stop Bush and the neocons circumventing our intelligence community:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Stor...,999737,00.html
nor did it stop them from invading:
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~immerman/p...houtADoubt.html
Major circumvention:
| quote: | Most remarkably, on September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA was to produce its postponed assessment, Mr Feith's cell went directly to the White House and gave an alternative briefing to Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff [Scooter Libby], and to the National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's deputy [Stephen Hadley].
The briefing contained the section alleging "fundamental problems" with CIA intelligence-gathering. It also gave a detailed breakdown of the alleged meeting between [9/11 hijacker Mohammed ]Atta and an Iraqi agent [in Prague].
The following week, senior Bush officials made confident statements on the existence of a link between Saddam and al-Qa'eda. Mr Tenet would learn of the secret briefing only in March 2004.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai.../ixnewstop.html |
And BTW, many of those same neocon players that started their little "Office of Special Plans" to circumvent intelligence? Well, please don't think they are new at this game:
| quote: | Air Force Intelligence was estimating that Soviets would deploy 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles by the early '60s. The intelligence branch of the Strategic Air Command figured the Soviets would, or might already, have 1,000 or more.
...The CIA, on the other hand, calculated the number at about 50.
(By the time John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, photos from spy satellites revealed that the Soviets had just four ICBMs.)
http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?a...rint&id=2073238 |
Back in the Nixon years, Tricky Dick was setting up a policy of detainment with the Soviets. Well these cute little neocons didn't like that much, so they "took matters in their own hands":
http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?a...rint&id=2073238
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...MNG62FDUGL1.DTL
Notice any familiar names there? Rummy? Cheney? Wolfowitz? Doug Feith and Richard Perle. Except back then they weren't called "Office of Special Plans. They called themselves "Team B". And back then they're policy was to engage the Soviets in a nuclear fucking war.
No, I'm not fucking kidding. They really believed that was the answer.
Just as they believed the answer to their problems nowadays was to divert attention away from al Qaeda and bin Laden and invade Iraq. But you see, Iraq is part of a larger picture. And just like they were so very, very wrong about their claims of WMDs on Iraq, so too were they so incredibly fucking wrong about their claims against the Soviets:
| quote: | In 1978, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the selection of Team B members yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases. Consequently, the Team B analysis was deemed a gross exaggeration and completely inaccurate.
http://www.newamericanstrategies.or...fldArticleID=62 |
Did everyone get that line? Here, have another look:
| quote: | | Consequently, the Team B analysis was deemed a gross exaggeration and completely inaccurate. |
Here's another report from the same SFGate article on how far out of bounds Team B was:
| quote: | | In retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms ... proved to be wrong," Raymond Garthoff, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, wrote in a paper for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence [in 2002]. "On several important specific points it wrongly criticized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat." |
"Always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat."
C'mon, kids, repeat after me:
"Always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat."
Sounding familiar yet? Kinda eery and coincidental?
Well, that brings us back to Iran. Don't think for a second this "Team B", uhh I mean "Office of Special Plans" run by the same bang-up crew who fucked with our Iraqi intelligence doesn't have a plan for Iran all along:
| quote: | War with Iran has been in the works for the past five years, shaped in almost complete secrecy by a small group of senior Pentagon officials attached to the Office of Special Plans. The man who created the OSP was Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy. A former Middle East specialist on the National Security Council in the Reagan administration, Feith had long urged Israel to secure its borders in the Middle East by attacking Iraq and Iran. After Bush's election, Feith went to work to make that vision a reality, putting together a team of neoconservative hawks determined to drive the U.S. to attack Tehran. Before Bush had been in office a year, Feith's team had arranged a covert meeting in Rome with a group of Iranians to discuss their clandestine help. . . .
In the end, the work of Franklin and the other members of Feith's secret office had the desired effect. Working behind the scenes, the members of the Office of Special Plans succeeded in setting the United States on the path to all-out war with Iran.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politic..._next_war/print |
Here's some more:
| quote: | Leading the charge against Iran is [American Enterprise Institute]'s Michael Ledeen, perhaps best known for setting in motion the US-Israeli arms deal with Iran in the mid-1980s that became known as Iran/contra. Supporting Ledeen's position are two other AEI fellows: Richard Perle, the ringleader of the neocons and a former member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, and David Frum, a Weekly Standard contributing editor and the former White House speechwriter who coined the phrase "axis of evil." In their new book, An End to Evil, Perle and Frum call for a covert operation to "overthrow the terrorist mullahs of Iran." Speaking to retired US intelligence officers in McLean, Virginia, in January, Ledeen called Iran the "throbbing heart of terrorism" and urged the Bush Administration to support revolutionary change. "Tehran," he said, "is a city just waiting for us." . . .
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.m...0412&s=dreyfuss |
Ya just gotta love these boys, don't cha?
But I want you to keep in mind something - nothing will stop Bush from invading Iran, evidence be damned. I am more and more convinced of that everyday. The confrontation is not something he is doing reluctantly - this is and has been planned for some time, much in the same manner as they planned on going after Iraq for some time. Say what you want about this group being nothing shy of delusional, insane, maniacal, whatever. The evidence is there that they attempted long and hard to do this before, and they've already succeeded with Iraq. Nothing tells me that any window of opportunity will allow them to do it again. But what's worse, they don't really see any windows this time.
So they're bringing their fucking sledgehammers, busting out a fucking hole in the wall and creating one instead.
Finally, let me turn your attention back to the outed CIA covert officer, Valerie Plame who's job was to investigate WMD proliferation. As was mentioned above, she investigated WMDs in Iraq and came up very empty.
Iraqi wasn't her only beat:
| quote: | MSNBC has learned new information about the damage caused by the White House leaks.
Intelligence sources say Valerie Wilson was part of an operation three years ago tracking the proliferation of nuclear weapons material into Iran. And the sources allege that when Mrs. Wilson’s cover was blown, the administration’s ability to track Iran’s nuclear ambitions was damaged as well.
http://movies.crooksandliars.com/HB...huster-Iran.wmv
Originally reported by Raw Story
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2005/O...ng_on_0213.html
, and later confirmed by MSNBC |
Steve Clemons of the Washington Note writes:
| quote: | "According to some inside the intel arena, Valerie Wilson's work had a lot to do with monitoring Iran's nuclear weapons appetite and capabilities and possibly helped feed Iran nuclear technology junk that could distract and complicate Iran's weapons program efforts. If true, this is quite consistent with the Iran Chapter" in James Risen's new book, State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration, Free Press (January 3, 2006) ISBN 0743270665.
"But if this account of Plame-Wilson's activities is true, those who exposed Valerie Plame Wilson helped undermine American national security in much more major ways that haven't yet been disclosed."
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.ph...lame#Iran_Intel |
Cheney got a nice twofer here - expose a CIA operative for revenge toward her husband speaking out against the lack of evidence purported by this Administration on Saddam's nuke capability, and then damage any future intelligence on Iran that would run counter to any claims this neocon Administration makes its case towards.
There is absolutely no reason to trust what this Administration says about Iran at this point. It's why Congress, including a healthy number of Republicans are telling Bush not to even think about attacking Iran in any manner without Congressional approval. They don't trust him any more than the majority of the public. Given Bush and this neocon Administration's track record, I see no reason why anyone should.
(big h/t to occam's hatchet for much of this info.)
___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...
|
