This all seems eerily familiar

November 20, 2006

Seymour Hersh has a rather astonishing piece in the latest edition of the New Yorker, concluding that, White House bluster notwithstanding, a draft intelligence assessment by the CIA has found “no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program.” (thanks to SKNM for the heads-up) Naturally, the Bush gang isn’t terribly impressed — with either the Hersh article or the alleged CIA report.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino did not respond directly to Hersh’s assertions, but said the article was another “error-filled piece” in a “series of inaccuracy-riddled articles about the Bush administration.”

“The White House is not going to dignify the work of an author who has viciously degraded our troops, and whose articles consistently rely on outright falsehoods to justify his own radical views,” she said on Monday.

Ad hominem attacks notwithstanding, if Hersh is correct, an eerily familiar pattern is emerging. Indeed, watching Hersh on CNN yesterday, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve heard all of this before.

According to Hersh, the White House has reacted with hostility to the CIA’s report and, as it did with Iraq, is bypassing the agency by collecting and compiling its own intelligence for a possible military strike. On CNN yesterday, Hersh said there is an “internecine fight” going on between the CIA and the White House over the intelligence process, “the same fight, by the way, that we had before Iraq.”

At issue between the White House and the CIA is access to secret intelligence on Iran allegedly being provided by the Israelis. According to Hersh’s new article, “The Next Act,” intelligence from “Israeli spies operating inside Iran claimed that Iran has developed and tested a trigger device for a nuclear bomb.” The Israeli report is being used by White House hawks within the administration to refute the CIA and “prove the White House’s theory that the Iranians are on track” to build the bomb. A former senior intelligence officer told Hersh, “The problem is that no one can verify it. We don’t know who the Israeli source is. … Where is the test site? How often have they done it? How big is the warhead — a breadbox or a refrigerator? [The CIA doesn’t] have that.”

Hersh told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday, “That information is being handled pretty much by the White House and various offices in the Pentagon. And the CIA isn’t getting a good look at the Israeli intelligence. It’s the old word, stovepiping. It’s the president and the vice president. It’s pretty much being kept in the White House.” Hersh’s reporting suggests a breakdown in the intelligence process — similar to the one that occurred prior to the Iraq war — is now happening with regards to Iran and may open to door to possible intelligence manipulation. Before the Iraq war, the White House set up intelligence stovepipes to “get information they wanted directly to the top leadership.”

What’s that definition of “insanity”? Repeating the same mistake over and over, expecting a different result?

This, coupled by the usual media suspects talking up the possibility of war on outlets like Fox News, is probably cause for concern, isn’t it?

Kinda makes you wonder how deeply Israel has been involved in this whole Middle East debacle.

Assuming, of course, that the White House isn’t just making up the whole story of an ‘Israeli agent inside Iran’ to provide yet another bogus justification for another bogus war. If they can’t prove it, it’s just hearsay.

One is reminded of ‘Tailgunner Joe’ McCarthy’s famous list of alleged Communist agents that he wouldn’t show to anybody either and which later turned out to be of no more validity than a blank sheet of paper.

I’m beginning to think that we need to impeach both Bush and Cheney just to keep them from blowing more of the world up. Obviously they can’t be trusted to use the American military like responsible adults.

  • Any war to end the middle east threat is just going to be a first step in accelerating that threat. You can win a war against a government but you can’t win one against a people. In guerrila warfare like Vietnam every citizen was a soldier, but now every citizen is a bomb.

  • You’ve just got to wonder about the line of thinking these morons have adopted.

    “We simply don’t know if the Iranians are building a nuclear weapon—so we have to bomb them into eternity.”

    Let’s see how it looks, if “I” use this method of thinking:

    “We simply don’t don’t know if Dick Cheney will go freaking bonkers with a shotgun in a Democratic-controlled Congress—so someone has to (insert comically-evil, barbarically-medieval, violent berserker-act of your choice here) him before January 2007.

    See? I told you it was silly….

  • Well, now I understand the WaPo article (just read the title) saying the Pentagon is figuring out how to get out of Iraq. We want to be away from the Iranian border when the strategic bombing campaign starts.

    This is the Air Force (and Navy’s) chance to prove they win wars (remember Kosovo?) and the Army and Marine Corps don’t.

    Oh, and thanks Bushites for really being the cherry on top of a S**TY day.

  • Lance- you are looking at it wrong. We want a semi-stabilized Iraq, so that we can launch our forces directly from there into Iran. It’s very hard to move against Iran while we are still doing BS police-type work against an insurgency, and a waste of our troops and their real training- full-fledged warfare. So, we make Iraq into a general police-state, lock down the place using Iraqis, then launch our troops directly across the border into Iran…

    After all, did you really think that those massive airbases which we have been building out in the desert were meant for pacification of Iraq? They only make real sense if they are launch points for a different target.

  • Could this be how The Undecider gets Iran to help in Iraq? “Help us out or we’ll bomb you back to the stone age. Heh heh.”
    Although I suspect an attempt to launch another war would result in bombs falling on the White House. Bolling Air Force base just down the Potomac.

    OT
    “…viciously degraded our troops…”
    Stick a sock in it Perino.

    New rule. Members of the GOP who go after people for “insulting” the soldiers shall have a combat boot stuffed down their craw, be bundled into a plane and flown to Iraq. They’ll be dropped over the area where the fighting is fiercest.

  • A few questions:

    1. Does the President have the authority to launch anything more than an “air assault” (and we know how much he loves those)?

    2. Wouldn’t Congress need to approve sending troops there?

    3. And could there be a revolt if they try?

    4. And where in the hell would the troops come from for any type of ground force?

    It seems to me that we may be getting way ahead of ourselves here, depending on the answers to the above questions.

    Either that, or the comment last week that this administration thinks it’s just playing a big game of “Risk” really is true.

  • “The White House is not going to dignify the work of an author who has viciously degraded our troops”

    Yes, nothing hurts troop morale more than the knowledge that their Commander-in-Chief and the people running the Pentagon are F%#KING IDIOTS.

  • Gastor Troy said-After all, did you really think that those massive airbases which we have been building out in the desert were meant for pacification of Iraq? They only make real sense if they are launch points for a different target.

    In a town meeting last spring, Mark Souder, the Bushite Representative IN-3 made an off-hand comment that Iran was just minutes from Iraqi airfields while other American airbases are hours away.

    you need to read the entire Hersh peice to plunge the depths of Cheney-Bush lunancy. For example, because evidence of an Iranians nuclear weapon program cannot be found, it is proof that Iran is good at hiding its program.

    The Hersh peice also talks about strikes against Iran as a “failure forward” policy. Attacking and overthrowing the Iranian regime would ensure success in Iraq buy removing some Shia militia support and showing Iraqis that there can be “democracy” in the middle east. Hersh likens it to “doubling your bet”.

    Curmudgeon also has it right. Israeli intelligence disinformation is likely the Israeli tail waging the American Dog of War onto Iran.

    Whether Bush will be more dangerous with a Democratic congress than he was with a Republican congress will be an interesting question.

  • We’re all set for the next move, which would be Israel taking out the nuclear sites we know about. Once that happens, Iran would retaliate against our forces (because we’re in range) and against Israel (depending on their long range capability after the initial Israeli/US airstrikes)

    US forces may also get in on the initial attacks to blunt the Iranian counterattack, once we see that Israel is going in regardless.

    If the American troops have been hit, Bush will level Iran with strategic nuclear strikes, and a huge majority of Americans will be fine with that because they will see it as payback for Iran hitting our guys.

    After that the long war begins, and hell opens up. Hopefully Israel has seen how the war games always end, and is thinking about ways to deter Iran without ending millions of lives. But they might actually see Iran as a mortal threat, and if they do we should be ready to see them attack, and drag us into it because they will need political cover for their attack.

  • Bush is at the point in his Presidency where they start thinking hard about their historical legacy. He knows that as things now stand, he will be pretty much regarded as a bumbling idiot due to Iraq, Katrina, etc.
    But there is one last chance to turn the whole sad mess around, and that is a sucessful war against Iran. The temptation must be huge, and I wouldn’t bet against him trying it.

  • I never thought I’d be cheering for the CIA, but one has to believe that the CIA administrators are miffed at being ignored and rebuffed like this. Go CIA!

  • Anyone who thinks the Israeli Right hasn’t been part and parcel of the whole NeoCon thing from the get-go, and the whole change in American middle east policy, fails to look at who the NeoCons are, what their entire careers entail, and what political group with a warped view of reality in the Middle East that is running a country and would think it would have anything to gain from all this insanity, hasn’t been paying attention.

    These “Israeli agents” are the contemporary version of the INC “defectors” from five years ago.

    Like I say, the only way these people are going to be stopped is with cedar stakes and mallets.

  • I wonder if the “Israeli agents” have cool nicknames like “Curveball”.

    Maybe “Play Action Pass”, or “Power-I”.

    Or “Fumbleroski”

  • I never thought I’d be cheering for the CIA, but one has to believe that the CIA administrators are miffed at being ignored and rebuffed like this. Go CIA!

    [JWK]

    And not for the first time. I feel a little sorry for the Company. They must have miles of files on Boy George (child of former director, child of a president) so they knew what was coming when he got elected. And from what I’ve seen of that disgrace to humanity, he probably regards the CIA as “his” because daddy was their boss.

    Of course, they could have found a way to warn the rest of us so the sympathy meter has never climbed above 15% and is now resting on 3%.

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