Bushit! Lies the US media does not challenge and warcrimes they don't discuss.
« on: 2007-11-17 13:25:29 »
Bush's Favorite Lie
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
When cataloguing George W. Bush’s lies – even if you stick just to his fabrications about the Iraq War and the “war on terror” – there are so many to choose from, it’s hard to pick a favorite.
There’s the one about how before Sept. 11, 2001, Americans thought that “oceans protected us” – although perhaps not from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads, which during the Cold War had school children hiding under desks and homeowners buying bomb shelters.
After taking office in January 2001, Bush was so confident about the protective oceans that he pushed aggressively for a "Star Wars" missile defense system.
Or there’s Bush’s oft-repeated claim that al-Qaeda terrorists are poised to dominate the world through a caliphate “stretching from Spain to Indonesia,” though in reality they are a bunch of crazed misfits forcibly exiled from their own countries and now living in caves along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Bush also insists that Americans must heed what Osama bin Laden says, like when this homicidal maniac supposedly calls Iraq the “central front” in the “war on terror,” the American people must keep troops there indefinitely.
But it’s never explained why it makes sense for the United States to let bin Laden’s public declarations shape Washington’s policies.
There’s a chance, you see, that bin Laden is either completely nuts or perhaps clever enough to bait Bush into taking actions that actually help al-Qaeda, like getting the United States bogged down in Iraq, alienating the Muslim world and diverting military resources away from where bin Laden is hiding.
Indeed, the evidence from captured (internal rather than public) al-Qaeda communications indicates that bin Laden’s high command considers Afghanistan and Pakistan – not Iraq – their central front.
In 2005, for instance, one intercepted letter, purportedly written by al-Qaeda’s No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri, asked fighters in Iraq to send $100,000 to headquarters back on the Afghan-Pakistani border. If Bush were right – and al-Qaeda considered Iraq the “central front” – one might expect that the money would be going in the opposite direction. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al-Qaeda’s Fragile Foothold.”]
Personal Favorite
But my personal favorite Bush lie is when he insists that the United States invaded Iraq to enforce a United Nations resolution and that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein “chose war” by barring U.N. weapons inspectors.
Bush dusted off that old canard on Nov. 7 while standing next to French President Nicolas Sarkozy during a press conference at George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon in Virginia.
Responding to a question from a French journalist about Bush’s dispute with France over the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. president said:
“We had a difference of opinion with your great country over whether or not I should have used military force to enforce U.N. demands. … I just want to remind you that [U.N. Resolution] 1441 was supported by France and the United States, which clearly said to the dictator, you will disclose, disarm, or face serious consequences. Now, I'm the kind of person that when somebody says something, I take them for their word.”
Bush has made this same false argument scores of times dating back to July 2003, several months after the invasion when it was becoming clear that Saddam Hussein had told the truth when his government reported to the U.N. in 2002 that Iraq’s WMD stockpiles had been eliminated.
Hussein also relented in fall 2002, allowing U.N. weapons inspectors to travel freely around Iraq checking out suspected WMD sites. The U.N. inspectors found nothing and reported growing Iraqi cooperation in the early months of 2003. In other words, Hussein was complying with Resolution 1441.
Nevertheless, Bush was determined to invade Iraq and tried to get the U.N. Security Council to go along. However, France and most other members of the Security Council rebuffed Bush and sought more time for the inspectors.
Then, in defiance of the U.N. – and in violation of the U.N. Charter which prohibits aggressive wars – Bush forced out the U.N. inspectors and launched his “shock and awe” assault. After a bloody three-week campaign, U.S.-led forces toppled Hussein’s government, but found no WMD caches.
Instead of admitting the obvious facts – that he had launched an unprovoked war on false pretenses – Bush rewrote the history. Starting at a White House press briefing on July 14, 2003, Bush began insisting that he had no choice but to invade Iraq because Hussein wouldn’t let the U.N. inspectors in.
Bush told reporters: “We gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.”
Bush’s Litany
Facing no contradiction from the White House press corps, Bush repeated this lie in varied forms over the next four-plus years as part of his litany defending the invasion.
On Jan. 27, 2004, for example, Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.”
As the years went by, Bush’s lie and its unchallenged retelling took on the color of truth.
At a March 21, 2006, news conference, Bush again blamed the war on Hussein’s defiance of U.N. demands for unfettered inspections.
“I was hoping to solve this [Iraq] problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “The world said, ‘Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.’ … We worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny the inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did.”
At a press conference on May 24, 2007, Bush offered a short-hand version, even inviting the journalists to remember the invented history.
“As you might remember back then, we tried the diplomatic route: [U.N. Resolution] 1441 was a unanimous vote in the Security Council that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. So the choice was his [Hussein’s] to make. And he made a choice that has subsequently caused him to lose his life.” [Hermit: Note the use of the passive voice here! It is a classic obfuscation.]
Not only have Washington journalists stayed consistently silent in the face of this false history, some have even adopted Bush’s lie as their own. For instance, in a July 2004 interview, ABC’s veteran newsman Ted Koppel used it to explain why he – Koppel – thought the invasion of Iraq was justified.
“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had been defeated once before by the United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to lose control over his country if all he had to do was say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out,’” Koppel told Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”
Of course, Hussein did tell the U.N. to “come on in, check it out.” But that was in the real world, not in the faux reality that governs modern Washington.
Bush’s Iraq lies are now entering a new political generation, seeping into Campaign 2008. At the Republican debate on June 5, 2007, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney defended Bush’s invasion on the grounds that Hussein refused to let U.N. weapons inspectors in to search for WMD.
If Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction,” the war might have been averted, Romney said.
Not surprisingly, Romney’s false statement was no more challenged by the CNN debate moderators than Bush’s earlier versions had been. By constant repetition, Bush has transformed his lie into what passes for truth in modern American politics.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Bushit! Lies the US media does not challenge and warcrimes they don't discuss
« Reply #1 on: 2007-11-20 14:09:00 »
I find the most interesting shifts happening in the midst of policy debates. First it was mission accomplished until it was obvious that the troops weren't coming home, and so there was some admission that mission wasn't accomplished and never was in order to justify the extended stay. Then supposedly everything was going well or just turning better, until the need for the surge/escalation is introduced, and then suddenly we get admissions that things aren't going well (and impliedly never were) to justify the build up. Now we get another set of rosey colored assesments that Al Qeda is on the run and scared and lots of military success reports.
Oh yes "people are talking to each other" passes for good political news even though no significant progress on the benchmarks has been made which of course is the real issue. I'm hearing glowing reports about how Iraqi Christians are being invited in . . . huh? I mean I'm sure there are *some* of those, but not many. They aren't one of the major sectarian political factions. Talk about narrowing the context to some tiny group in order to cherry pick a small piece of good news for the Fox/neo-con noise machine. Of course since they are Christian that gets attention in the US even if they are browner and speak less English than Jesus did.
Living in the US and understanding the real news on Iraq anymore becomes more of a practice of listening to what ISN'T said and ignoring everything that is. Basically if its something "Salamantis" is cutting and pasting, or Fox news is talking about, you can and probably should just ignore it . If its something they AREN'T talking about (for example something from a foreign or non-neo-con source) its probably worth at least considering. Thank Dog for the internet; I don't know how the other 70% of the population would overcome such propagandizing without it. I'm surprised anybody believes anything these people say anymore. Apparently there is a constant 25-30% of Americans who will believe anything this "good Christian man" and his administration tell them no matter how many times they've been lied to before. Talk about dogmatic faith.
On Monday October 29, 2007... The Multi-National Force Iraq turned over Karbala Province to the Iraqis.
This was supposed to be good news, right?
It wasn't.
The good news was drowned out by media reports that 20 headless bodies were found in Diyala Province.
On Tuesday, after there were already questions about this Diyala slaughter, TIME Magazine based their report on this horrible massacre:
The horrible discovery in Diyala Province Monday was disturbing even by the standards of Iraq's running sectarian violence. Iraqi police said they found 20 decapitated bodies dumped near a police station west of Baquba, the capital of Diyala province.
It was a lie.
The 20 headless bodies story was a hoax.
It never happened.
** There was never any evidence of this event. ** There was no official report on this event. ** There were no photos of this event. ** The Iraqi media denied this event. ** The MNF-I officials denied the event. ** The Diala Security Operations Chief denied the event.
TIME Magazine has never corrected their bogus report.
* * * * * * * * * *
On November 29, 2007... It happened again. The Western media including the Reporters Without Borders organization reported:
11 close family members of Jordanian-based Baathist reporter Dia al-Kawwaz, who runs the online anti-Iraq newspaper Shabeqat Akhbar al-Iraq, were slaughtered in Baghdad. The attack occurred in the Al-Shaab neighborhood shortly after 7 a.m. Shia militia men shot dead two of Kawwaz’s sisters, their husbands and their seven children, aged 5 to 10. They then exploded the house on their way out.
This made headlines around the world.
This was a lie, too.
Two days later, the "dead family members" of Dia Al-Kawwaz appeared on Iraqi television smiling and waving to the cameras.
They managed to convince the Iraqi audience that they were in fact quite alive.
** Not one Western Media Organization showed this photo or film of the waving family members.
Not one.
* * * * * * * * * *
On Thursday November 29, 2007... The mainstream media reported that 12-25 "construction workers" were killed in a Bombing by NATO forces in Afghanistan this time.
The so-called construction workers ended up being Taliban fighters after all.
* * * * * * * * * *
On December 2, 2007... The Dwelah Massacre made major headlines.
In the reports 13 people were slaughtered by Al-Qaeda in their sleep and their homes were torched in the village of Dwelah, Iraq... including a young child.
This was also a lie.
MAJ Peggy Kageleiry from Task Force Iron PAO responded to the reports:
"The story you are reading in the news is NOT true... CF assessment: Wildly inflated, irresponsibly exaggerated claims-no 600 families displaced, no 200 terrorists, no evidence of civilian KIA."
It was just another bogus media report from Iraq.
* * * * * * * * * *
On December 10, 2007... There was an explosion at a refinery in Baghdad. The media immediately reported it as a rocket attack:
A plume of smoke rises from Doura refinery after a rocket attack in Baghdad December 10, 2007. A rocket attack sparked a big fire at a domestic oil refinery in southern Baghdad on Monday but the plant was still operating, Iraqi police and officials said. (REUTERS/Mahmoud Raouf Mahmoud)
Flames and smoke rises from al Dora oil refinery in South Baghdad, Iraq, on Monday, Dec. 10, 2007. A rocket or a mortar shell hit the oil refinery, early Monday, police and an Oil Ministry spokesman said. The U.S. military confirmed an attack in the area. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
However, the fires were not set off by a a rocket attack. The MNF-Iraq Press Desk confirmed:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE RELEASE No. 20071210-03 December 10, 2007
Baghdad refinery fire deemed accidental Multi-National Division – Baghdad PAO
BAGHDAD – Multinational Division – Baghdad forces determined that the cause of a fire at the Doura Oil Refinery today was the result of an industrial accident.
The fire, which began around 9 a.m., was initially believed to have been started by indirect fire, but when units of the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Inf. Div. arrived on the scene, its cause was determined to be the result of a pipe explosion. (The MNF-I forces have not been able to conduct a definitive crater analysis to resolve what caused the explosion.)
* * * * * * * * * *
On December 13, 2007... The media reported that 12 mutilated bodies were found in Muqdadiya. CNN reported:
Iraqi soldiers have found a mass grave of mutilated bodies in a restive region north of Baghdad, a local security official told CNN Thursday.
It was another bogus report.
Task Force Iron's PAO- "This appears to be false reporting."
* * * * * * * * * *
In roughly six and a half weeks the mainstream media reported 6 bogus stories from Iraq and Afghanistan.
There certainly could be more.
They all reflected poorly on the US and US military.
Isn't it past time that the media be held accountable for their horrible record?
And... Is it really surprising that only 29% of Americans, Germans and Brits trust their media?
Re:Bushit! Lies the US media does not challenge and warcrimes they don't discuss
« Reply #4 on: 2007-12-19 21:17:06 »
Bush Probably Received New Iran Intel Last Winter
[ Hermit: I do wish that our local neoconehead troll would post on his on threads so he could simply be ignored, rather than interjecting off-topic and irrelevant posts based on AM radio show allegations. That said, this story just keeps getting clearer. Which may be why the neoconeheads are trying to avoid it. ]
Source: Inter Press Service Authors: Gareth Porter (Historian and author, his latest book is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press)). Dated: 2007-12-18
White House officials have now admitted that George W. Bush was told that the intelligence assessment on a covert Iranian nuclear program might change last August, but they have avoided answering the question of when the president was first informed about the new intelligence that led to that revised assessment.
That evasion is necessary, it now appears, to conceal the fact that Bush likely knew about that intelligence as early as February or March 2007.
The White House evasions began on the day the "key judgments" in the Iran National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) were released. At his Dec. 3 press conference, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was asked, "So was it recent weeks that this intelligence came in?" Hadley answered, "What the intelligence community has said is in the last few months."
In fact, no intelligence official had commented on when the crucial intelligence had been first obtained.
Then a journalist asked, "Steve, when was the first time the president was given the inkling of something? … Was this months ago, when the first information started to become available to intelligence agencies?" This time Hadley responded, "You ought to go back to the intelligence community."
The evidence now available strongly suggests, however, that Hadley dodged the question not because he did not know the answer, but because he did not wish to reveal that Bush had been informed about the new intelligence months before the August meeting with Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.
The key development that altered the course of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, according to intelligence sources, was the defection of a senior official of the Iranian Ministry of Defense, Ali Reza Asgari, on a visit to Turkey last February, as widely reported in international news media in subsequent weeks. The Washington Post's Dafna Linzer, citing a "senior U.S. official," reported on March 8 that Asgari, who had been deputy minister of defense for eight years under the reformist President Mohammad Khatami from 1997 to 2005, was already providing information to U.S. intelligence.
The senior official told Linzer, however, that Asgari was not being questioned about Iran's nuclear program, despite the fact that Asgari certainly had significant knowledge of policy decisions, if not technical details, of the nuclear program That incongruous denial that Asgari had anything to say about Iran's nuclear program suggested that the information being provided by Asgari on that subject was considered extraordinarily sensitive.
Intelligence officials have kept any reference to Asgari out of the discussion of the NIE. Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi has told IPS, however, that, according to intelligence sources, information provided by Asgari was indeed a "key component" of the intelligence community's conclusion that Iran ended its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003, although it was corroborated by other sources.
Giraldi says Asgari had been recruited by Turkish intelligence in 2003, and defected to Turkey after he had picked up indications that Iranian intelligence had become suspicious of him. Giraldi said his sources confirm press reports that Asgari came out with "bags of documents." Intelligence officials have confirmed that papers on military discussions of the nuclear program were part of the evidence that led the analysts to the new conclusion about the Iranian nuclear program.
Equally important to the NIE's conclusion, according to Giraldi, was the information provided by Asgari about the Iranian defense communications system that allowed U.S. intelligence to gain new access to sensitive communications within the Iranian military. That was a crucial to the intercepted electronic communications which also played a role in the analysis that led to the estimate's conclusion.
Gary Sick, who was the principal White House aide on Iran during the Carter administration and is now a senior research scholar at the Middle East Institute of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, says he believes Asgari's knowledge of the debate in Tehran's defense establishment also may have allowed the intelligence community to identify which intercepted communications were most important.
"There are zillions of pieces of evidence, and what you look for is defined by what you know," says Sick. "What Asgari gave them was a new way of looking at the evidence."
There are other indications that, by April 2007, the intelligence community was already intensively reviewing new evidence provided by Asgari and old evidence that the new information suggested could corroborate it. Thomas Fingar, chair of the National Intelligence Council, who was directing the whole NIE process, gave an exclusive interview to NPR's Mary Louis Kelly on April 27 in which he dropped hints of the new phase of the NIE process.
Fingar referred to "some new information we have" and declared, "We are serious about reexamining old evidence." Fingar even said that the estimated time frame for Iran's obtaining a nuclear weapon "might change," because "we are being completely open-minded and taking a fresh look at the subject."
It now seems clear that these were references to the search for corroboration of the basic intelligence obtained from Asgari about the Iranian nuclear program. But Fingar misled listeners about the direction of the intelligence community's investigation by seeming to suggest that advances in Iranian uranium enrichment announced earlier that month might cause analysts to shorten the minimum time frame within which Iran might have sufficient fissile material for a bomb.
Fingar said the evidence that Iran was beginning to enrich on an "industrial scale" was "one of the questions we have got to weigh the new information to see what it does to our judgment." He also referred to International Atomic Energy Agency reports on the Iranian program, allowing listeners to infer that that the delay in the NIE was due to new evidence that would lead to a more alarmist estimate on Iran's nuclear program
The Fingar interview suggests that the process of seeking corroboration of the 2003 change in nuclear policy in Iran was already well underway in April.
The intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program obtained as a result of the U.S. debriefing of Asgari, however, would have been made available to Bush as soon as it was evaluated as important by the intelligence officials. The debriefing of a high-ranking defector represents very important intelligence, and summaries of the most important information from such a debriefing would normally go into the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), the summary of key intelligence developments that is prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency each night and given to the White House the first thing the next morning.
"It is inconceivable to me that the PDB did not included whatever information Asgari gave us on the nuclear program," says Ray McGovern, a 26-year veteran of CIA who once presented the daily briefing to Richard Nixon. Furthermore, every major new development in the collection of intelligence obtained as a result of Asgari's debriefings would have been included in the PDB, according to McGovern.
Contrary to Hadley's suggestion that he didn't know when Bush had first gotten the new intelligence, moreover, McGovern points out that the national security adviser has gotten the same PDB as the president for decades. The former CIA analyst told IPS that Hadley certainly would have known when the new intelligence regarding the covert Iranian nuclear weapons program was presented to the president.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
The NIE report may have been a political move by Bush opponents in the State Department, as many have speculated. Or it could be disinformation. But what if it is something else entirely?
Intelligence breakthroughs are extremely rare and never advertised. The best example may be Britain's ENIGMA breakthrough in stealing a Nazi signals decoding machine , with Polish help. The ENIGMA secret was fiercely guarded at the cost of many Allied lives, and was not revealed until decades after the war ended. Churchill is believed to have allowed the Nazi bombing of Canterbury Cathedral rather than reveal to the Luftwaffe that he knew of it ahead of time.
So the idea that the NIE suddenly flipped from 2005 because of an intelligence breakthrough is pretty unlikely. The Ashgari defection is a possibility, but defectors are double-sided swords. Before the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law defected to the American side, and proved to be of limited value. He was eventually blackmailed into returning by threatening his family, only to be killed by Saddam's thugs in Baghdad.
The NIE may therefore be a Bush poker gambit, with the aid of Bush-hating liberals from the State Department. The Bush administration has become rather expert at deploying the relentless anti-Bush Left for its own purposes. The Left has made itself completely predictable, and a predictable poker player can be beaten.
A deliberately deceptive NIE could have two purposes.
1. It could pressure Israel and the Arabs.
2. It could mislead Ahmadi-Nejad.
Take the first possibility. With Khomeinist nukes on the horizon, both Israel and the Arabs are under unprecedented pressure. If you're Israel, and in A'jad's gunsights, you want American protection, and if possible, a preemptive strike. At the very least you want American cooperation in clearing the path for an Israel Air Force strike on known nuclear facilities in Iran, and US help in containing any blowback. The NIE tells you you're on your own until some time in 2010-2015. (But notice that the 2010 date is only just 2 years and a few days away, just one year later than the current Israeli estimate of 2009).
The Arabs would be under intense pressure for exactly the same reason. Above all they don't want a nuclear Iran next door, threatening each and every one of them. Strategically, Iran wants to control the OPEC price, as A'jad has made very clear. Ideologically, Iran's political Shiite branch of Islam wants to wrest control over Mecca and Medina from the Saudis, the key to Khomeinist control over the Muslim world. During Khomeini's time in power, Tehran sponsored an uprising of Shiite pilgrims to Mecca, which the Saudis have never forgotten. (The Saudis have only controlled Mecca and Medina for less than 100 years, and could be unseated by a powerful Iran-sponsored coup, backed by a nuclear threat against Riyadh.)
So if America seems lax against the Khomeinist rush to nukes, both Arabs and Israelis are put under tremendous pressure. The reason is the apparent failure of the Annapolis conference to produce a breakthrough. The details are still obscure, but the goals are pretty clear: Israel is under pressure to yield more of the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem, while the Arabs are expected to give open diplomatic recognition to Israel. For Israel that may seem like a dangerously bad bargain, which is why Olmert and Livni refused to go along with it. They could not go back to the Knesseth and expect it to win support.
That may change once the Israeli public and political system think through the implications of the NIE, which suggests that Israel's lone superpower ally could reduce its protection in the case of an Iranian attack. The Bush-Rice move may aim to force the entire Israeli political system to take difficult risks to empower the Palestinians. A Palestinian state as such is not at issue; Israel wants that, if for no other reason than to have some state authority be responsible for any attacks on itself. Nor is a symbolic PA presence in Jerusalem much of a problem. The Palestinians want more, because they, too, have to go back home and be able to present an unexpected "gift" to their followers. Otherwise Hamas will kill them, literally and politically.
So pressure on Israel could be one reason for the NIE. Pressure on the Arabs is another, as mentioned above. The massed gents of the Arab leagues, dressed in flowing robes, reacted like Dracula to a cross when confronted with Tzipi Livni. They simply could not bring themselves to shake hands in public. That's partly because of Livni's gender (even A'jad got into trouble from his enemies when he was seen touching an Iranian woman in public), and partly because the Saudis may be victims of their own hate-Israel propaganda campaign. You can't insist on wall-to-wall hate propaganda all your life without soaking it up yourself. And of course the Arabs know the fate of Saddat, after he was photographed kissing Golda Meir on the cheek during his breakthrough visit to Jerusalem.
What about the Iranians? A'jad celebrated the new NIE as a victory for the Khomeini cult. It helped his reputation at home. But it didn't stop France and Germany, which are genuinely freaked out by the Iranian danger, from demanding an increase in UN sanctions against Tehran a few days later. The Europeans didn't go back to sleep after the sort-of-reassuring US NIE. Even China has signaled it may be on board for stronger sanctions.
What the new NIE might do for the Iranians is lull them into thinking they are in less danger from a preemptive US-Israeli strike for the coming year. They know the Israelis would have difficulty striking their nuclear facilities without American cooperation. (It could be done, but not in a sustained bombing campaign.)
President Bush will soon travel to the Middle East. The iron rule for such high-level presidential trips is that any resulting agreements are negotiated beforehand, lest the President be embarrassed and weakened in public. It is possible, but not likely, that George W. Bush is taking a Hail Mary pass on this. So the full-court press is on right now to get solid agreements from the various sides. The negotiations have to take into account not just the principals, but their domestic opponents also. The Arabs in every country are afraid of being assassinated, or being pressured by the radicals. This process must appear as a victory to the Arab sides in order to be accepted at home.
The desired outcome is major Israeli concessions. These inevitably would put at risk two major Israeli red lines. One is the status of significant parts of Jerusalem. The second is the exposure of more of the Israeli population to terrorist acts, including missiles. Those are very painful concessions for the Israeli political class to make.
The US position is presumably that such sacrifices are better than the Iranian nuclear danger. On the upside, the US may be offering nuclear defense guarantees to all sides, along the lines of the NATO guarantees during the Cold War. It would be a de facto Middle East Treaty Organization.
Once its Arab and Israeli ducks are in line, the Bush-Rice line of thinking may be that a preemptive strike against A'jad's nuclear toys might be covertly supported by both the Arabs and Israelis.
The whole business may be an historic gamble, with historic up-sides and down-sides. It is not knowable if it can be pulled off; and if it is, it is not knowable if it would put the parties into grave danger. But as Condoleezza Rice no doubt reminded all the participants time and time again, the Iranian threat is also a grave danger.
If this analysis is approximately right, the Annapolis process is a very high stakes gambit, with possible great rewards, and great risks. There will be turmoil on all sides, though visible mostly on the Israeli side, since they are a let-it-all-hang-out democracy. Expect a fair amount of loud controversy.
Will it work? If it worked, would it turn out to be a positive thing? It's all very murky. But decisions must be made soon.
Others think, with good reason, that it is an attempt by government bureaucrats to attack Bush politically:
The Wall Street Journal editorial that ran this morning echoes and expands upon suspicions first articulated by the New York Sun that the National Intelligence Estimate was cooked up by bureaucrats eager to embarrass George Bush and transform US policy towards Iran.
A dynamic is at work that will serve Iranian interests by throwing a wrench in plans to expand sanctions against it for its nuclear program; it also will serve to veto any plans to attack its nuclear facilities.
The three main authors of this report are former State Department officials with previous reputations that should lead one to doubt their conclusions. All three are ex-bureaucrats who, as is generally true of State Department types, favor endless rounds of negotiation and "diplomacy" and oppose confrontation. These three officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, have "reputations as hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials".
They are Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
Tom Fingar was a State Department employee who was an expert on China and Germany -- he has no notable experience, according to his bio in the Middle East and its geopolitics.
Vann Van Diepen is also a career State Department bureaucrat who, according to the New York Sun, is one of the State Department bureaucrats who want "revenge" for having their views regarding Iran ignored by the Bush Administration. He is now seeking to further his own agenda. As the Sun wrote in their editorial yesterday:
Vann Van Diepen, one of the estimate's main authors, has spent the last five years trying to get America to accept Iran's right to enrich uranium. Mr. Van Diepen no doubt reckons that in helping push the estimate through the system, he has succeeded in influencing the policy debate in Washington. The bureaucrats may even think they are stopping another war.
Vann Diepen also shares a lack of experience in dealing with Iran or the region.
The third main author comes in for particular criticism in the Wall Street Journal editorial. Kenneth Brill served as the US Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (the IAEA). This is an agency that has served to enable Iranian's quest for nuclear weapons. The head of the IAEA, Mohammed ElBaradei, has even been called a friend by the Iranian regime. As he should be, for he has been an enabler of its nuclear weapons program and has stiff-armed European Union diplomats who have worked to restrain Iran.
Elbaredei and the IAEA have over-reached and now seek to control diplomatic negotiations with Iran -- a function that is beyond its mandate. Brill was apparently unwilling to stop this mission creep and put an end to Elbaradei's efforts to help Iran. Or, as the Wall Street Journal hints, maybe he was just incompetent. This hint comes from former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton's (who headed counter-proliferation efforts in the State Department previous to his UN posting) new book:
For a flavor of their political outlook, former Bush Administration antiproliferation official John Bolton recalls in his recent memoir that then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage "described Brill's efforts in Vienna, or lack thereof, as 'bull -- .'" Mr. Brill was "retired" from the State Department by Colin Powell before being rehired, over considerable internal and public protest, as head of the National Counter-Proliferation Center by then-National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.
Brill also has no previous history of experience dealing with Iran. (He graduated from Business School at Berkeley in 1973!).
All three of the authors of this NIE study are former State Department employees (none of them are nuclear physicists). All who are familiar with the ways of Washington know that the State Department is a fourth branch of government -- at least in its own collective mind -- that seeks to forge its own policies which may often conflict with the policies desired by its putative boss, the President. Washington being Washington, this desire can manifest itself in ways fair and foul .
As the Bush Administration winds down to its conclusion, perhaps these three authors are angling for positions in the new Administration (presumably a Democratic one). They may hope to be rewarded for their "analysis" since Democrats are already using this report for partisan gain.
We have three State Department flexing their muscles to derail our policy towards Iran. This has apparently had a ripple effect, as our allies have expressed a belief that this NIE report will stop efforts to enact a new round of sanctions against Iran. Who gains? Iran.
This is one more step that will be noted in the future that enabled Iran to develop a nuclear arsenal.*
* Recent reports, by Kenneth Timmerman and others, indicate that a single human source may be responsible for the conclusions of the NIE. This would probably be a former aide to the Iranian defense minister and a retired general with long service in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (recently categorized as a terrorist entity) who disappeared in Europe earlier in the year.
One should recall the notorious Curveball -- also a human source -- whose "stories" led the CIA to conclude that Iraq had an active WMD program. Curveball lied and our use of him for intelligence has been widely castigated. Are we relying now on an Iranian with a long history of service to the Iran Revolutionary Guard for our intelligence? Could he be a plant to distort our intelligence? Has history repeated itself as a farce and as a tragedy?
Still others claim that the US intelligence committe has been a victiom of disinfomation:
In March of 2007 Iranian Revolutionary Guards General Ali-Reza Ashgari defected to the West through Turkey. General Ashgari is the highest-ranking defector from Iran ever, a huge bonanza for our understanding of the Khomeinist regime's intentions and capabilities with regard to nuclear weapons.
If he is for real. Troubling circumstantial evidence suggests that he is not.
This week, a public summary of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran made worldwide headlines. Contrary to endless public statements made over three decades from Khomeini to Ahmadi-Nejad, contrary to the 2005 NIE, contrary to the recent UN report, and contrary to Israeli intelligence, the new NIE claims that Iran's nuclear weapons program was stopped in 2003 and, by implication, has not been restarted since then.
We're safe! Nothing more to worry about from maniacs with nukes.
So -- what happened between the National Intelligence Estimate of 2005 and today's NIE to give the US intelligence community "high confidence" to confirm an end to Iran's nuclear bomb program in 2003?
The defection of General Ashgari (along with several other high-ranking Guard officers) is a plausible explanation for the new Intelligence Estimate. We don't know what Ashgari reported to Western intelligence. Chances are that much of his information was accurate, if out of date. He would need to give that much to gain credibility.
But there is a famous history of the CIA jumping on Soviet double agents -- Golitsyn and Nosenko -- who poisoned the wells of US intelligence with great success. These phony Soviet defectors could be the model the Iranians are emulating.
Iran might have dropped phony defections to give ammunition to the many liberal opponents of President Bush's Iran policy, who are sprinkled throughout our intelligence and foreign policy apparatus.
The new NIE might be the result of Iranian phony defector reports. Since we seem to have very poor human intelligence inside the Khomeinist regime, the Guard defectors (there were several of them) might be greeted by Democrat partisans in the bureaucracy like manna from heaven. The new phony intelligence would confirm their passionately held biases - a routine technique in disinformation ops.
Dropping phony defectors would be a smart strategy, and the A'jad regime prides itself on such things.
Defectors can paralyze US intelligence. It's nearly impossible to tell truths from lies or paranoid exaggerations, a maze that famously destroyed the career of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton in the 1960s. Phony defectors do not even have to be believed, as long as they confuse US intelligence enough to undermine truthful information. They kick sand in our eyes.
A few public facts suggest that Ashgari may have been a plant. He left a wife and children behind in Iran, ready blackmail victims to control his behavior abroad. His defection coincided with other high Guard officers disappearing, perhaps to confirm Ashgari's phony message. In Tehran there was no visible purge, or even public expressions of heightened suspicions, after the spectacular loss of face due to a high-level defection -- contrary to Ahmadi-Nejad current accusations of "treason" against his pragmatist enemies in the regime. And finally, after the biggest (presumed) scandal revealing treachery in the trusted Guards, there was no loss of power or prestige for the massive Guards faction of the regime.
Ahmadi-Nejad just seemed to shrug off the Ashgari defection. The obvious question is why?
According to former Reagan Administration CIA official Herbert Meyer, writing yesterday in American Thinker, "It's no exaggeration to say that Iran holds the key to whether we will have a nuclear war."
The stakes could not be higher. _______________________________________________________________
What IS clear, is that few of our cross-Atlantic allies are buying it. Israel isn't buying it. Britain isn't buying it. France isn't buying it. Germany isn't buying it.
In fact, the vast majority of American citizens aren't buying it, either.
And remember that they stated with 'high confidence' that Iran's nuclear program was halted during the first year of our liberation of Iraq, when our army on both sides still made them nervous. What they could NOT state with high confidence, however, was that it has not been subsequently restarted.
The hardest part of building a nuke is obtaining sufficient fissile material and fabricating it into an effective warhead. The other parts of a number of bombs could well have been already designed and built. They already have Shahab missiles to employ as launch platforms. And Iran is claiming 3000 nuclear centrifuges (in Natanz and probably elsewhere), which would give them a bomb's worth of enriched uranium in 9 months - but their target is 54,000 centrifuges, which would give them a bomb's worth every 15 days. This from a country that has yet to complete its Bushehr reactor, and has no other, yet refuses to accept prefab fuel rods for it from any number of nations, is sitting on a pool of oil so they can't claim they're starved for power, and could have better spent the money on another oil refinery to produce gasoline (they only have one). Oh well; once they get the uranium - if they haven't gotten it already - they'll have to fashion it into a useable warhead somewhere else besides in that Syrian facility staffed with North Koreans that Israel just bombed to bits.
Re:Bushit! Lies the US media does not challenge and warcrimes they don't discuss
« Reply #6 on: 2007-12-21 11:49:33 »
No More Slam Dunks
[ Hermit : In any zero-sum-game analysis, Israel is the major "loser" of the NIE. Rather than its puppet-enabler having to once again carry the brunt of the cost of attacking its perceived enemy, Israel perceives the collapse of its preferred policy of being the power behind the strike; where the US would strike a blow on its behalf, while simultaneously protecting Israel from International disapprobation. The result is that the Zionist networks and their stooges around the world have apparently gone into a frenzy of activity based entirely on brazen lies and visibly speculative pseudo-analysis attempting to force an unprovoked, "preemptive" (aka illegal war of aggression) attack on Iran by the US (or failing all else Israel) as "the only possible conclusion." To any partially rational person, this ought to be seen as being enlightening and instructive (as well as a sick joke), as the only people to whom this leap of faith makes sense are those advocating a Zionist perspective (and anti Islam aggression) to the exclusion of all other perspectives, without reason or consideration, and so can be taken as a reliable indicator of these cats-paws. ]
A reality-based assessment of Iran’s nuclear capability
Source: The American Conservative Authors: Philip Giraldi (Former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro Associates.) Dated: 2007-12-21 (For publication in the 2008-01-14 Issue)
The bombshell National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program asserted with a “high degree of certainty” that Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons in 2003 due to international pressure and as part of a negotiated agreement with the Europeans. The report stated that even if Tehran were to restart its program, it would not have enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon until 2010 at the earliest.
The NIE is widely seen as a decisive blow to the neoconservatives and Bush administration hawks who have been advocating a preemptive attack on Iran, depriving them of their principle casus belli. They have counterattacked, claiming that the report is based on flawed information or even Iranian disinformation, that the CIA has a history of poor analysis of proliferation issues, and that a politicized intelligence community is out to get the White House and/or Israel.
The political landscape in Washington has not yet shifted dramatically. By demonstrating that Iran has acted as a rational player, the report gives advocates of negotiations without preconditions a stronger hand. Those who still seek war have already re-written their talking points. They argue that as Iranian intentions and plans remain suspect, Teheran must be denied any ability to enrich uranium. On Dec. 4, President Bush stated that the military option remains on the table, while warning seven times that Tehran might use “knowledge” of how to enrich uranium to secretly construct a bomb. Other administration spokesmen have insisted that Iran must be denied the engineering infrastructure to manage the nuclear fuel cycle, even for peaceful purposes. The White House has asserted that it still regards Iran as its major foreign-policy problem.
An alarmed Israel, where the report’s conclusions have been rejected by both politicians and media, is considering taking unilateral action against the principle Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz. If Israel were to attack Iran, it would need Washington’s help, and U.S. forces would almost certainly be involved in any Iranian retaliation.
The history of how the NIE was developed provides an effective rebuke to those attacking it. Since late 2006, the White House has been aware that the NIE would not confirm the existence of an Iranian weapons program. In January 2007, John Negroponte resigned as director of national intelligence because he backed his analysts and refused to order the rewriting of the key judgments that appeared in the NIE draft. Vice President Dick Cheney’s office subsequently demanded several revisions and numerous reviews of the source material. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is loyal to the president, but, like Negroponte, was unwilling to alter the conclusions for the White House, and the administration eventually became resigned to a final report that it knew would contradict policy.
Contrary to administration claims, when conclusive new intelligence demonstrating that the Iranians had cancelled their weapons program became available in early summer 2007, the White House was informed. It is no coincidence that President Bush and his aides soon began to downplay Iranian nukes and started to emphasize “they’re killing our soldiers” to make its case against Tehran. In November, McConnell, under pressure from Congress to finish the NIE, agreed to White House demands that it be kept classified, but when the report was finally completed a month later, an unclassified summary was prepared because of concerns that inevitable leaks by Democrats in Congress would make it appear that the administration was again deceiving the American people.
The actual NIE process makes clear how impossible it would be to cook the books in order to damage the administration. Sixteen separate intelligence agencies contribute to the report and must concur on key judgments. In the case of the Iran NIE, every detail of evidence for the report’s conclusions was looked at repeatedly and from all angles. In the classified version, there are more than 1,500 footnotes describing the sources used. When the draft came to tentative conclusions, the findings were attacked by analysts acting as a “red team” to determine if there were flaws in the analysis or whether Iranian disinformation was being used to mislead CIA analysts. This process was repeated over and over again until everyone was satisfied with the results. A final no-holds-barred review took place in the White House in mid-November, attended by Bush, Cheney, Robert Gates, Condoleezza Rice, and senior staff members, where objections to sourcing and conclusions were aired. No agenda-driven judgments could possibly survive the process.
The claim that the CIA has historically had trouble reporting accurately on proliferation is based on the 2002 and 2005 Iraq and Iran NIE’s. Reporting on Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and the A.Q. Khan network was also flawed. But the 2007 Iran NIE should be judged on its merits because intelligence is not a science but a process, based on the best assessment of available information.
After the fiasco of the Iraq NIE, the Agency took a hard look at what had gone wrong. It decided that there were three issues that produced bad analysis: poor information sources resulting in “garbage in, garbage out,” political pressure to make the intelligence match the policy, and “groupthink” where assumptions based on past intelligence shape the current analysis.
To address the poor information problem, the Agency launched a major operation against Iran designated the “Persian House,” involving 175 case officers and 35 analysts. It also aggressively went after traveling Iranian officials and businessmen in Europe and the Persian Gulf, most particularly in Dubai, where the Iranian government actively does business to avoid sanctions enforced elsewhere. The effort was successful and, combined with improved technical collection against Iran, provided a window into the Iranian nuclear program. Key information came from Ali Resa Asghari, a general in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who was recruited in 2003 and jointly run by the CIA and the Turkish intelligence service, MIT. Before defecting in Istanbul in February, Asghari provided critical intelligence on the Iranian program as well as on Tehran’s defense communications, permitting the NSA and CIA to obtain still more information. The intelligence available to analysts on Iran improved dramatically.
Both the Iraq NIE and the 2005 NIE on Iran suffered from White House staffers, mostly neoconservatives from Vice President Cheney’s office, participating in the review process. To deal with the problem of such political pressure, Director of Central Intelligence Michael Hayden and DNI Mike McConnell isolated analysts from policymakers and also took steps to deal with the groupthink problem. In the 2002 Iraq NIE, the consensus view that Saddam Hussein must have weapons of mass destruction influenced analysis, but proved to be untrue. The Iran NIE was instead constructed from the ground up with every assumption being challenged. The critics of the NIE curiously engage in their own groupthink when they claim that the CIA’s record of failures in the past mean that it has likely failed again. This time, however, the CIA has gotten it right.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Iran's Nuclear Terror It's no surprise Iran was behind the vicious bomb attacks that killed 114 in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s. But what is surprising is why Iran did it: Argentina wouldn't help Iran to build nuclear weapons. http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=282960362524432
To those apologists for Iran who counsel patience, remember: Iran has been at this a long time. Its nuclear program started under the Shah, but in recent years has taken a sinister turn under the Ayatollah Khomeini's successors.
Take the attacks on Argentina, viewed by many at the time as an isolated, bizarre attempt to kill Jews. It was that, all right — but much, much more.
Indeed, the bombings of the early 1990s had what suspense sleuths like to call an "ulterior motive" — to send a message to Argentina that its refusal to help Iran build nuclear weapons would be dealt with severely.
Tehran's Argentine terror bombings began in 1992 with an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires that killed 29. Two years later, its agents bombed the city's AMIA Jewish community center, killing another 85.
According to Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who has stayed with the case while the rest of the world has forgotten it, the attacks were "ordered, planned and financed" by Iran's top leaders — including its ex-president, the "moderate" Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Nisman told the Jerusalem Post that the AMIA bombing "had been commissioned at a meeting held in Mashad in August 1993, attended by then-president Rafsanjani, then-intelligence minister Ali Fallahian and other Iranian ministers and military leaders."
They gave the job to their terrorist client, Lebanon-based Hezbollah. The group did the job with its usual murderous efficiency.
Why go to all that trouble halfway around the world to kill Jews? In fact, it wasn't just about killing Jews. To Iran, that was a bonus. The real reason: Iran's mullahs had a deal with Argentina to help it rebuild its nuclear program after the Iran-Iraq war. Argentina, under intense pressures from the U.S., pulled out of the deal.
Iran's leaders were furious, and took their rage against the U.S. out on the much-weaker Argentina. That's why some of Iran's top leaders got involved.
Nisman, to his credit, is now seeking the arrest of several Iranian leaders who were responsible for the terrorist murders, including Rafsanjani. Somewhat surprisingly, the international police group, Interpol, has agreed to uphold the arrests, dealing what Nisman called "an unprecedented diplomatic defeat for Iran."
At this point, you might ask: Isn't this old news?
The answer is, no. For one thing, many of those involved in ordering that attack in power in Iran are still in power now. At the very least, they should be delivered up for justice.
More importantly, this puts the lie to Iran's claims that its nuclear program is for "peaceful purposes." Anyone who has in mind "peaceful purposes" doesn't murder 114 innocent human beings.
In fact, Iran's program has always been about nuclear weapons, not energy. Just look who's in charge: Iran's nuke program is headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the chief of the Revolutionary Guard Corps., the head of the Defense Industries Organization and the leader of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization.
Strictly speaking, none of those is a civilian.
Those who trumpet the recent National Intelligence Estimate, which suggested Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, should perhaps read a little deeper. That same report also said there was "moderate-to-high confidence" that Iran is "keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons." It will have enough raw nuclear material by the middle of the next decade to do so, especially now that Russia is selling it fissionable material.
Tehran's duplicity and its attempts to acquire nuclear weapons with which to dominate the Mideast and bully Europe are nothing new, as Nisman's charges show. Nor is the West's ability to deceive itself about Iran's true intent.
MONKEY POINT, Nicaragua — The second military helicopter in as many days hovered over the jungle and then landed to a most unwelcome reception from several dozen angry Rama Indian and Creole villagers. Rupert Allen Clear Duncan, a leader of some 400 Creole who live along the shoreline, confronted the foreigners dressed in suits and military uniforms that day in March and demanded to know the purpose of their aerial trespasses.
"This is our land; we have always lived here, and you don't have our permission to be here," Duncan spat, when refused the courtesy of an explanation.
Not until Duncan threatened to have his machete-waving followers damage the aircraft did they learn that some of the men were from the Islamic Republic of Iran and had come promising to establish a Central American foothold in the middle of their territory.
As part of a new partnership with Nicaragua's Sandinista President Daniel Ortega, Iran and its Venezuelan allies plan to help finance a $350 million deep-water port at Monkey Point on the wild Caribbean shore, and then plow a connecting "dry canal" corridor of pipelines, rails and highways across the country to the populous Pacific Ocean. Iran recently established an embassy in Nicaragua's capital.
In feeling threatened by Iran's ambitions, the people of Monkey Point have powerful company. The Iranians' arrival in Nicaragua comes as the Bush administration and some European allies hold the threat of war over Iran to force an end to its uranium enrichment program and alleged help to anti-U.S. insurgents in Iraq.
What worries state department officials, former national security officials and counterterrorism researchers is that, if attacked, Iran could stage strikes on American or allied interests from Nicaragua, deploying the Iranian terrorist group Hezbollah and Revolutionary Guard operatives already in Latin America. Bellicose threats by Iran's clerical leadership to hit American interests worldwide if attacked, by design or not, heighten the anxiety.
"The bottom line is if there is a confrontation with Iran, and Iran gets bombed, I have absolutely no doubt that Iran is going to lash out globally," said John R. Schindler, a veteran former counterintelligence officer and analyst for the National Security Agency.
"The Iranians have that ability, particularly from South America. Hezbollah has fronts all over Latin America. That is not new. But it's certainly something we're starting to care about now."
American policymakers already had been fretting in recent years over Tehran's successful forging of diplomatic relations, direct air routes and embassy swaps with populist South American governments that abhor the U.S., such as President Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. But Iran's latest move places it just a few porous borders from Texas, where illegal Nicaraguan laborers routinely travel.
The disquiet with this proximity is rooted in Iran's track record and Bush administration saber rattling that has gone unabated despite a recent National Intelligence Estimate report that concluded Iran could build nuclear weapons if it wanted but had ended a clandestine weapons program.
Diplomats or terrorists
Four consecutive American administrations have designated the Islamic theocracy a State Sponsor of Terrorism since 1984 for ordering Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence operatives, sometimes posing as diplomats, to conduct bombings, assassinations and kidnappings worldwide.
Among the more indelible of these were the suicide bombings of Marines in Beirut, the 1996 Kobar Tower bombing in Saudi Arabia and assassinations from Beirut to Washington.
Few Nicaragua observers believe Iran seriously plans to follow through on any of its $500 million promises or has any obvious need for trade ties with one of Latin America's poorest countries.
Opposition politicians say they understand why Iran might want relations with oil-rich Venezuela and Bolivia but wonder aloud if Iran really is so interested in Nicaraguan bananas as their return on investment.
Those who view Iranian intentions with suspicion point to the new Iranian diplomatic mission in Managua as one reason for all the promises.
"They use their embassies to smuggle in weapons. They used them to develop and execute plans," said Oliver "Buck" Revell, who served as associate deputy director over FBI intelligence and international affairs. "Diplomats have immunity coming and going. It is a protected center for both espionage and, on occasion, for specific operations. So an embassy in Managua is definitely an area that will be of concern to our national security apparatus."
Front and center on many minds is Argentina's contention that Iran, using its embassy as cover, orchestrated two Hezbollah bombings of Israeli and Jewish community targets in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s.
This year, Argentina secured Interpol arrest warrants for five former Iranian officials, most of them who worked as diplomats in the Buenos Aires embassy. Iran denies Argentina's charges.
Also in recent months, the U.S. military repeatedly has accused Iran's Revolutionary Guard of using diplomatic cover in Iraq to help insurgents kill American soldiers. Iran denies that charge too. In October, the Bush administration and Congress designated the Revolutionary Guard and its elite arm, the Quds force, as global terror organizations.
Israel is worried about Nicaragua, too, noting the Israeli business community in next-door Costa Rica, Jewish populations throughout Latin America and Iran's repeated vows to militarily destroy the Jewish state. Israel has promised to take action alone if diplomacy fails to halt Iran's nuclear programs.
Said one Israeli envoy in the region who requested anonymity, "It's just that they could use their diplomatic infrastructure to repeat Argentina. They'll promise millions, they won't send a penny. But they will send a delegation."
Publicly so far, U.S. administration officials, who opposed Ortega's bid for the presidency last year, aren't saying much. But privately, State Department officials in Washington hint that Iran's move to Nicaragua — and Ortega's warm reception — isn't being taken lightly.
Some intelligence experts presume the Iranian move to Nicaragua already has stepped up foreign espionage operations to an extent not seen since in that country since the Cold War.
To be sure, not everyone views the Iranian move to Managua as nefarious. Some foreign policy analysts depict Iran's outreach to anyone offering a welcome mat as a logical response to defeat two rounds of U.N. Security Council sanctions and gain voting U.N. friends as more rounds are contemplated.
"Iran has its own foreign policy. They're just trying to extend their influence," said Peter Rodman, a senior fellow in foreign policy for the Brookings Institute. "They'll stick to economic activity."
Other analysts see as entirely logical that Iran would project a deterrent in America's backyard to make Washington think twice about military action.
"When you've got Washington calling you evil, and there's a steady stream of reports from Washington about bombing campaigns, what would you do if you were an Iranian strategic planner?" said Dennis Jett, dean of the International Center at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "These guys have a track record of using diplomats and diplomatic missions as a mechanism for terrorism, so why wouldn't they be making that calculation now?"
A mystery compound
Twelve-foot-high concrete walls topped by neat rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire protect the manicured grounds of a mansion inside. The compound is not unlike many others in the affluent Managua suburb of Las Colinas, except for a telltale identifier.
From the street outside, through the wire at just the right angle, can be seen the top half of the distinctive red, white and green flag of Iran. This is the temporary embassy of Iran's new envoy to Nicaragua, Akbar Esmaeil-Pour.
The envoy, however, hasn't been in a talking mood lately, since local media stirred just the sort of questions that fuel Yankee fears. Last month, the country's largest-circulation newspaper, La Prensa, published leaked government documents that showed Nicaragua's chief immigration minister personally authorized 21 Iranian men to enter the country, without visas that would have left a record.
Officials denied the report until confronted with the document but refused to explain why the men were let in that way or what became of them.
Another report named as Revolutionary Guard operatives several men who accompanied the Iranian envoy to his new digs. A Honduran newspaper in June reported that Iranians had entered that country without permission from Nicaragua.
Knocks on embassy gates over four days recently drew Nicaragua national police guards and two polite aides but no interview. A call to Esmaeil-Pour's private cell phone showed how much curiosity his presence has stoked lately.
"I've had hundreds of requests for interviews, and yours is only one! I'm very busy," the ambassador snapped before hanging up.
The Ortega government also wouldn't talk as internal criticism mounts about the country's new alliance. But politicians from his Sandinista Party were quick to defend the country's right to relations with Iran or any other country willing to invest in Nicaragua. Several predicted Iran would follow through and said Nicaragua never would knowingly allow terrorist activity.
"Nicaragua's agenda in its international relations does not depend on whether a third country has good or bad relations with x or y country," said Walmaro Gutierrez, a Sandinista Party congressmen. "To identify a country as terrorist just because of nationality, race, ethnicity or religion is discriminatory. I want to make clear we have signed the (U.N.) international convention against terrorism. We are very responsible."
Opening the door
No one disagrees that old grudges and American neglect helped open the door for Iran. From 1980 to 1988, the CIA clandestinely fielded the Contra rebels for a guerilla war on Ortega's Soviet-backed regime, at one point funding them from secret arms sales to a Sandinista ally at the time, Iran.
Ortega boasts solid anti-American credentials, aligning in the old days with Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, and more recently defending Iran's right to develop nuclear bombs.
U.S. relations with Ortega's successors improved during the 1990s, but did not entail much in the way of foreign aid that could be leveraged now.
Nicaragua remains neglected, with the western hemisphere's third-lowest per-capita income, a vast foreign debt and energy shortages so profound that electricity must be rationed.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saw opportunity in Ortega's election. He was in Managua talking about hydroelectric and oil projects the week of Ortega's January inauguration. By August, Ahmadinejad had committed to fantastic promises that, along with Monkey Point, include fixing the Pacific port of Corinto and building 10,000 houses.
Ortega's alignment with Iran and Venezuela is causing some political blowback that may erode his thin public support. Some opposition leaders and reform-minded Sandinistas don't like that Nicaragua has taken sides in a fight that doesn't involve it.
Recent presidential candidate Eduardo Montelegre, who finished as the runner-up to Ortega, said Ortega is "irresponsible" to risk Nicaragua's rebounding trade and good standing with the West by providing Iran a possible staging ground — even unwittingly.
"This is very simple. You draw a line between democracy and terrorist countries, and we don't want to be on the wrong side of the line," Montelegre said. "If the U.S. goes to war on Iran, those who are on the wrong side are not going to fare well."
But most Nicaraguans hardly can afford to consider such intrigue. They are living hand-to-mouth existences in slums or squatting on bits of land. Sufficient numbers of them voted to elect Ortega and don't seem to particularly care who he brings to the dinner table.
Neglected port
A pile of scrap metal, rusted to a brownish orange, is all that remains of oil tanks that CIA-led Contras blew up in a 1983 speedboat raid on Nicaragua's port town of Corinto. The shrapnel-riddled tanks stood until just four months ago, when new Sandinista port directors decided to tear them down.
The pile symbolizes a new dawn for Nicaragua, insisted Absalón Martínez Navas, the neglected port's newly installed Sandinista vice manager.
"We have investors," Navas announced. "It's nothing concrete yet. But we're making studies. We're making plans, not only to develop the port but also the community."
One of the biggest backers, he said, is going to be the Iranian government. Probably. Two months earlier, the Iranians signaled they were serious when they sent a top transportation official to tour the port's crumbling surfaces, decommissioned warehouses and out-of-date machinery.
The Sandinista government's hope for Corinto is a $100 million upgrade and two new wharfs, to then be connected by the dry canal to Monkey Point. This scheme, Navas explained, would enrich Nicaragua by drawing Venezuelan oil and shipping business from the Panama Canal, Costa Rica and El Salvador.
The dry canal has been around on paper for nearly 100 years. But it found new life in a drive by Venezuela's Chávez to wean his country's huge oil industry from loathed dependence on U.S. refineries, transportation and markets.
This comes as good news on the streets of Corinto's many barrios and at City Hall, where Mayor Ernesto Mendez adorns his office walls with Chávez posters and Sandinista propaganda.
Many of the town's 18,000 people live with no electricity or plumbing, and depend on the port for meager sustenance. Alphonso Jose Estrada, who spent 30 years working at the port, wishes the Iranians the best of luck.
"Even the U.S. is accused sometimes of being terrorists," he said. "Just because the Iranians are coming here doesn't necessarily mean they're going to cause terrorism. We'll see more ships. That's going to mean more jobs."
That's a much-shared sentiment in a town where the port is so decrepit that only a ship or two a week docks.
One recent evening, word went out over an invisible grapevine that a ship was coming. Hundreds of men wearing yellow hard hats converged in waves of bicycles to vie for shifts as stevedores or forklift operators. The pay: a precious $8 per 12-hour shift.
After an hour or two of anxious waiting, only a few dozen were picked, the rest consigned to pedaling home with bad news. Many who land one or two shifts a month welcome any plan — by anyone — to bring more.
Some of the bicyclists stopped long enough to talk about the Iranian proposal but wouldn't give names, for fear of not getting selected to work.
"It's a bad friend," one young bicyclist said of the Iranians. "But if the bad friend builds the port, then they're a good friend!"
A land rights clash
Feelings about the Iranian promises mostly break a different way at Monkey Point, on Nicaragua's other coast. The Rama and Creole here mostly live on Nicaragua's political margins, subsisting on fish and jungle animals in isolation. Time is still told by sun and tides.
Because of their separateness, a more contrarian streak prevails that may, in the end, prove more than just an irritant to the Ortega government's partnership with the Iranians. Many Monkey Point young men fought with the Contras against Ortega's Sandinistas. They've been feeling rebellious again since the helicopters came.
The Monkey Point community wants legal rights to roughly a half-million acres where generations have lived. Twice in the past 10 years, people there have resisted development proposals.
Pearl Watson, the self-styled community president who travels the globe raising awareness, said the community made substantial progress under previous governments, including a new law under which it can stake a formal claim. That's why Watson said people felt especially pained when the Iranians and Venezuelans showed up with another port proposal that did not seem to recognize all that had gone before.
"They don't want to tell the people nothing; they just want to show up and do what they want," Watson said in her office in the bustling coastal town of Bluefields, a 30-mile boat ride from Monkey Point. "Our people don't like the way the government is imposing development on us, with no guarantees of how the people will benefit."
Lately, she's been reaching out to human rights organizations to help fight Ortega, and considering filing a case in international courts if the port idea progresses before their land boundaries are decided. A successful campaign could throw quite a wrench in the Monkey Point plans.
But the fear of forcible removal by their old enemies, the Sandinista Party, if all this fails is palpable where jungle and beach meet. Frustration is on the rise. Lately, some of the young men have begun talking about reminding the Sandinistas that this same community once fought with the Contras, that they might not have turned in all the weapons.
"It gonna be total destruction for us if them build it down here," said Rupert Allen Clear Duncan, the community leader who confronted the helicopter delegation. "Here we have a beautiful life, man. We never find us living anywhere else."
Re:Bushit! Lies the US media does not challenge and warcrimes they don't discuss
« Reply #8 on: 2007-12-22 00:04:02 »
I briefly reviewed the flood of cut and pastes that our persistent neocon troll pasted on our thread and decided that rather than wading through the bullshit, I would first rather suggest that our Virian reader review the concept of bullshit.
If you are really bored and have too much time on your hands, then I would only suggest that the troll spewage simply represents bullshit one step removed, seeming to only reflect some vague recognition of the truth - the NIE - or rather of the bullshitter in chief having been caught YET AGAIN showing absolutely NO respect for the truth. How many thousands of more lies does a chronic bullshitter tell than your simple liar? How many thousands of articles of neocon spewage are necessary to justify his reality-challenged arrogant incompetance ass now?
It would seem to me that a marginally competant liar might just innocently say "Ooops. Well, we all make mistakes, but look how well the wars in Iraq and Afganastan did the job in dissuading the Iranians from nuclear weapons. See the policy is working, and now thankfully we don't have to attack Iran for at least a few more months anyway . . . stay tuned". But of course he's incapable of such competant lying. I'd almost be convinced if he were, but incompetant bullshitting is predictable if nothing, and so the neocon choir keep spewing ever more incredulous and more tenuous justifications. The depths of his incompetant bullshit leaves he and all his "thinktankers" irretrievably in idiotic justification mode. So if you really have nothing better to do with your time, you've been warned.
On the other end of the spectrum, to all the outraged anti-war folks, I feel your pain, however please review this from the perspective of bullshit rather than simple lying.
Olbermann to Bush "You Sir, Are a Bold-Faced Liar!"
Mo to Olbermann, its worse than that, he's a chronic bullshitter. He believes his lies, and thus is incapable of even learning from them. He is incompetant beyond malicious; he's actually incapable of knowing truth in the first place. And its not because he's stupid; its because he never gave a damn in the first place. Nixon and Clinton were liars; at least they cared a little.
Re:Bushit! Lies the US media does not challenge and warcrimes they don't discuss
« Reply #9 on: 2007-12-22 18:16:46 »
Justifying the Iraq War: Why the NIE Is Wrong
[ Hermit : I like listening carefully to in-field experts when making decisions. James Gordon Prather is a nuclear physicist who served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico. ]
Source: Antiwar.com Authors: Gordon Prather Dated: 2007-12-22
In case you thought that Bonkers Bolton was finally right about something – that the U.S. Intelligence Community had finally staged a "quasi-putsch," had finally stood up to the Likudniks and assorted neo-crazies hell-bent on launching a "pre-emptive" attack on Iran, had properly assessed the voluminous information the Iranians have made available (voluntarily or upon special request) to the International Atomic Energy Agency about Iran's nuclear programs, and had finally produced a thoroughly professional National Intelligence Estimate [.pdf] on Iran – think again.
First, there is this "assessment";
"We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons."
Followed by this "judgment";
"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."
Who's "We"?
Well, many of them are the same folks from the dozen or so "intelligence" gathering and analysis groups scattered throughout the Federal government who produced the October 2002 NIE on Iraq for George "Slam-Dunk" Tenet. (Or was it for Dick Cheney?)
That 2002 NIE totally ignored the best intelligence available on Iraq's nuclear programs, the publicly available IAEA reports, covering the years 1992-2002, documenting the destruction of Iraqi nascent capabilities to produce not-nearly-pure Uranium-235 and crude high-explosive implosion systems with which to compress the U-235 – if and when they ever managed to produce it – to super-criticality.
What that 2002 NIE on Iraq ought to have "assessed" was that until the fall of 1991, Iraqis were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons.
Then, what that 2002 NIE on Iraq ought to have "judged" was that the first Gulf War and its immediate aftermath put an end to all Iraq's nuclear programs – peaceful and otherwise – and that in succeeding years no effort had been made to resurrect them.
And, finally, in the weeks and months immediately preceding the launch of President George W. Bush's war of aggression, to effect regime change in Iraq, when IAEA Director-General Mohammed ElBaradei and MOVIC Chairman Hans Blix, were regularly testifying before the UN Security Council that Iraq's Full and Final Declaration of its Weapons of Mass Destruction programs appeared to be full, final and accurate, "Slam-Dunk" Tenet just sat there on his hands, when he should have been trying to alert Congress that the 2002 NIE was fatally flawed.
But, this time, for the 2007 NIE on Iran – according to Scott Ritter, former Marine intelligence officer, UN inspector in Iraq, and author of Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change – our intelligence community has been working closely with the IAEA inspectors in Iran.
After thousands of man-hours of go-anywhere see-anything inspections, at sites "declared" by the Iranians and at others, some military, suggested by our intelligence community, ElBaradei has declared there is "no indication" that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
Consequently, a year or so ago our intelligence community sought to revise its 2005 NIE on Iran to reflect what the IAEA was not finding.
So, what's a member of the Cheney Cabal, hell-bent on bombing Iran – with nukes, if necessary – to do?
Well, after holding up its release for more than 10 months, allow our intelligence community to make public its 2007 revision, wherein they make no mention of the IAEA but "assess with high confidence that until fall 2003" ( when ElBaradei began his intrusive inspection campaign) "Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons."
[ For the purposes of this Estimate, by "nuclear weapons program" we mean Iran's nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran's declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment. ]
Well, of course. As everyone knows; "Many of the front companies engaged in procuring nuclear technology are owned and run by the Revolutionary Guards."
How does everyone know that?
Surely you've heard about the "smoking laptop" and the Green Salt project.
According to the Washington Post, the only chronicled activity on that allegedly stolen Iranian laptop – which apparently is the principal basis of the 2007 NIE – that was clearly nuclear-related was the Green Salt Project.
"In the spring of 2001, a small design firm opened shop on the outskirts of Tehran to begin work for what appears to have been its only client – the Iranian Republican Guard. Over the next two years, the staff at Kimeya Madon completed a set of technical drawings for a small uranium-conversion facility, according to four officials who reviewed the documents.
"Several sources with firsthand knowledge of the original documents said the facility, if constructed, would give Iran additional capabilities to produce a substance known as UF4, or 'green salt,' an intermediate product in the conversion of uranium to a gas."
Well, if you want to know what a real intelligence professional thinks about the smoking laptop and the 2007 NIE on Iran, please – please – listen to Scott Ritter's December 6, 2007 interview on Antiwar Radio.
After listening to Ritter, you probably won't care much what Henry Kissinger or James Schlesinger or Bonkers Bolton think about it. [ Hermit : Or what our even less informed and blatantly irrational neoconehead, Dees/Salamantis chooses to cut and spew from AM Radio like sources. ]
They're all extremely upset that the 2007 NIE excludes from Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program Iran's IAEA Safeguarded programs.
And you can see why.
As best the IAEA can tell, there is nothing nuclear in Iran that isn't IAEA Safeguarded, as the 2007 NIE now implicitly acknowledges. There's nothing covert – if there ever was – to bomb.
Hence, Kissinger's lament at the "extraordinary spectacle" of the President's National Security Advisor having to defend Bush's ongoing threats to "take-out" Iran's "nuclear weapons program" in the face of the 2007 NIE that judged there isn't one to "take out."
For Kissinger, Schlesinger and the Likudniks, the possible production of almost-pure Uranium-235 in Iran's Safeguarded facilities, for use in nuclear weapons, has been, by far, the greatest danger. Never mind that Iran could not possibly produce, unannounced and undetected, such almost-pure Uranium-235 in an IAEA Safeguarded facility.
In any case, Kissinger, Schlesinger and the Likudniks argue that the principal reason the Iranians "halted" their alleged nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003 – if they, indeed, did – was that Bush launched his war of aggression on Iraq and they were afraid they would be next.
In other words, the 2007 NIE on Iran justifies Bush's war of aggression against Iraq.
Of course, if Scott Ritter is right, the Iranians never had a nuclear weapons program to halt. And, the Likudniks and the neocrazies have known that all along. [ Hermit : And like Scott Ritter, Gordon Prather and the FAS, I judge that there is no credible evidence or even a credible suggestion that Iran has ever had a program seeking to create any form of nuclear weapon. Unlike the USA and Israel who seem to be behind the current ballyhoo. Makes you think, doesn't it?]
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
The NIE is explicit about not addressing civil (as opposed to military) uranium enrichment. But who besides a BDS-blinded hermit is foolish enough to think that people like Khameini and Ahmedinejad would not expropriate whatever fissile material they wanted from that program to build their devoutly desired nukes? And the NIE asserts, with "high confidence", that Iran stopped their nuclear weapons program about the time that the US entered Iraq. However, they can only state with "moderate confidence" that the programs have not been restarted in the interim. And neither Israel,
I usually don't look at his posts unless they happen in the midst of otherwise normal conversation threads, and then only sometimes. I missed this one until I was reviewing the thread today. Unlike his more boring absurdities, that was simply too ridiculous to ignore.
I usually don't look at his posts unless they happen in the midst of otherwise normal conversation threads, and then only sometimes. I missed this one until I was reviewing the thread today. Unlike his more boring absurdities, that was simply too ridiculous to ignore.
I was simply pointing out that the majority of the American people, unlike the BDS-infected and reality-challenged denizens here, understand that the NIE was a political document aimed at monkeywrenching the Bush administration's policy re: Iran. I notice that there were no naive chuckles addressed to the intelligence agencies of Britain, France, Germany or Israel.
And it's not just the NIE that the American people disbelieve; it's the media:
Growing media attempts to influence public opinion and policies
Poor quality
A strong liberal bent in most media
Fox News, CNN and NBC as the most accurate
FAIRFIELD, Conn.—A Sacred Heart University Poll found significantly declining percentages of Americans saying they believe all or most of media news reporting. In the current national poll, just 19.6% of those surveyed could say they believe all or most news media reporting. This is down from 27.4% in 2003. Just under one-quarter, 23.9%, in 2007 said they believe little or none of reporting while 55.3% suggested they believe some media news reporting.
“The fact that an astonishing percentage of Americans see biases and partisanship in their mainstream news sources suggests an active and critical consumer of information in the U.S.” stated James Castonguay, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of SHU’s Department of Media Studies & Digital Culture. “The availability of alternative viewpoints and news sources through the Internet no doubt contributes to the increased skepticism about the objectivity of profit-driven news outlets owned by large conglomerates,” he continued.
The perception is growing among Americans that the news media attempts to influence public opinion – from 79.3% strongly or somewhat agreeing in 2003 to 87.6% in 2007.
And, 86.0% agreed (strongly or somewhat) that the news media attempts to influence public policies – up from 76.7% in 2003.
Americans surveyed provided poor ratings for the national news media on six different characteristics measured. The average overall positive rating across all six characteristics measured was 33.4%. The highest positive rating, 40.7%, was recorded for quality of reporting followed by accuracy of reporting at 36.9% and keeping any personal bias out of stories (33.3%).
Other low positive ratings included: fairness (31.3%), presenting an even balance of views (30.4%) and presenting negative and positive news equally (27.5%).
“Americans know bias and imbalance when they see it and they don’t like it. When most service organizations strive for consumer satisfaction ratings in the high eighties to low nineties, an overall positive rating of 40.7% is dismal,” said Jerry C. Lindsley, director of the Sacred Heart University Polling Institute. He added, “Americans know that it’s just not that hard to present both sides and keep personal bias at home.”
By four-to-one margins, Americans surveyed see The New York Times (41.9% to 11.8%) and National Public Radio (40.3% to 11.2%) as mostly or somewhat liberal over mostly or somewhat conservative.
By a three-to-one margin, Americans see news media journalists and broadcasters (45.4% to 15.7%) as mostly or somewhat liberal over mostly or somewhat conservative.
And, by a two-to-one margin, Americans see CNN (44.9% to 18.4%) and MSNBC (38.8% to 15.8%) as mostly or somewhat liberal over mostly or somewhat conservative.
Just Fox News was seen as mostly and somewhat conservative (48.7%) over mostly or somewhat liberal (22.3%).
The most trusted national TV news organizations, for accurate reporting, in declining order included: Fox News (27.0%), CNN (14.6%), and NBC News (10.90%). These were followed by ABC News (7.0%), local news (6.9%), CBS News (6.8%) MSNBC (4.0%), PBS News (3.0%), CNBC (0.6%) and CBN (0.5%).
In 2003, CNN led Fox News on “trust most for accurate reporting” 23.8% to 14.6%.
How the Poll Was Conducted
The Sacred Heart University Polling Institute completed 800 interviews with residents nationwide between November 26 – December 5, 2007. The sample was generated proportional to population contribution in all 50 states. Statistically, a sample of 800 completed telephone interviews represents a margin for error of +/-3.5% at a 95% confidence level.
[Salamantis] In other words, most Americans agree with you that the media is biased; just not in the direction you believe.
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