How Cheney Cooked the Intelligence on Iran
As I reported for Inter Press Service this week, Dick Cheney has been trying to pressure intelligence analysts who have not drunk the neocon kool-aid on Iran to go along with his line on the issues at stake in a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that the White House has been holding up for more than a year. Think Progress immediately noted the parallel between the Cheney's effort to get an Iran NIE that is more to his liking and the way he pushed intelligence analysts to accept the fabrications the neocons were pushing in on Iraq in 2002.
The similarities between Cheney's efforts to cook the intelligence on Iraq and on Iran are worth noting, but so are the differences. Cheney may have had a bigger impact in shaping the intelligence estimate on Iran to fit the policy he is pursuing than was the case on Iraq in 2002.
The Washington Post reported in June 2003 that Cheney and his chief of staff Scooter Libby had visited CIA analysts several times in 2002 to get them to reexamine their skeptical analysis on the WMD issue. But equally important, the Post quoted a "senior agency official" as saying that speeches by Cheney in August 2002 charging Saddam with having a nuclear weapons program "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here."
The effect was achieved despite the fact that the October 2002 NIE on Iraqi WMD was done very quickly, because it had been forced on the White House in September by the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Bob Graham. The White House had only just begun to roll out its propaganda campaign on the fictive Iraqi nuclear weapons program at that point.
Now flash forward to autumn 2006. Cheney had a draft NIE on Iraq that he didn't like. The intelligence community had already issued an NIE on Iran in spring 2005 that had concluded Iran's nuclear program would not progress to the point of having the capability to produce a nuclear weapon until sometime between 2010 and 2015. The new draft Iran estimate was still reportedly offering a similar analysis. Cheney wanted it to endorse the neocons' alarmist view that Iran could acquire the knowledge with which to make nuclear weapons much sooner than that.
Furthermore, Cheney needed an NIE that would support the policy of attacking Iran over its alleged role in Iraq and seizing supposed Iranian "Quds force" personnel there. He wanted it to endorse the charge that Iran is supplying armor-piercing weapons to Shiites in Iraq who were killing American troops. But the draft NIE didn't do that, according to former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi.
So part of Cheney's strategy was to keep sending the draft back for further work while he was creating a new political atmosphere on Iran's role in Iraq. He began in early 2007 to use the U.S. military command in Iraq to wage an intensive propaganda campaign on how the Iranians were supplying EFPs to anti-U.S. Shiite guerrillas through the Quds force. Ignoring intelligence available to the military that EFPs were being manufactured in machine shops in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus and his subordinates formulated a new narrative that would dominate media coverage and political discourse on the issue of Iran and Iraq.
That Iranian EFP narrative has now been repeated without any alternative view being reflected in the media for ten months. The complete dominance of that narrative in the society for so long has certainly had its effect on the NIE process. As a former CIA intelligence officer told me, "Look, most of the intelligence analysts are young guys with less than ten years of experience. A lot of them are willing to give the administration line on Iran the benefit of the doubt."
My sources suggest that the analysts ready to go along with the new narrative are now the majority. Nevertheless, some intelligence analysts on Iran are reportedly still refusing to say that there is concrete evidence to support the official line that the Iranian regime is exporting EFPs to Iraq. They are insisting on including their dissenting views on the issue in the NIE.
That is why the new Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, under orders from Cheney, has refused to circulate the NIE until all dissenting views on the issue have been removed.
There has been no comparable administration propaganda campaign over Iran's nuclear program, so Cheney's tactics were more direct. Last April the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Thomas Fingar, who presides over the NIEs, was made to go on National Public Radio and declare that the intelligence community was reevaluating whether its judgment on how soon Iran might produce a nuclear weapon needed to be revised. Fingar said the estimate "might change" and vowed that the analysts were "serious about reexamining old evidence". He even revealed the fact that the NIE on Iran was being delayed because of the reexamination.
Although he didn't say so explicitly, Fingar's statement left little doubt that the White House had forced the reexamination of the analysts' judgment on the Iranian nuclear program by holding the NIE hostage. How successful that hardball tactic has been in getting language more acceptable to Cheney is still not known, but there were still differences of view on the issue in the draft NIE as of last month, according to my sources.
These approaches to cooking the intelligence on Iran are even more nefarious than Cheney's direct approach on Iraq in 2002. They will certainly give Cheney language supporting his belligerent policy that he can leak to the press and use to keep Congress in line. Hopefully responsible officials with access to whatever dissenting views remain will leak those to anti-war Democrats, along with more details about how Cheney has manipulated the process.
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How many times are these criminals going to get away with this crap?
We should also remember that Cheney and his accomplices knowingly sabotaged the ability of analysts using Brewster Jennings as their cover to track Iranian efforts to acquire and deploy WMD. How conVEEEENient. Damage the ability of competent people to give honest advice, and then claim that your misrepresentations represent a consensus.
It's not too late to tell your Congressperson that impeachment hearings on the Vice-President should start with no further delay.
We've known for a long time that the Bush Administration lied about WMD in Iraq.
What is saving them from prison is the spineless Democrats who refused to impeach them.
"The American Republic is in remnant status. The stage is set for our country to devolve into a military dictatorship, and few seem to care."
--Rep. Ron Paul
Bush and Merkel have a "plan for Iran," according to the news services. More sanctions are planned even as verification that Iran is not going nuclear is coming in. Does this have something to do with the IPI pipeline being touted in Iran?
Corporate America makes all global decisions. The fix is in. A big quid pro quo on the environment, for example, allows multinationals and American corporations to hire mercenaries to protect pipelines and use terror.
Cheney uses his own intelligence sources and controls others. Certain lobbies are "calling the tune," in Iran and elsewhere. In France there is a court investigation Cheney. We do not "police the world," we actually need a world police to police the activities of the United States. The big money has overcome our government's ability to resist the influence of the corporations.
Moving operations overseas allows these companies to run rampant without access to American courts. The MSM does not cover this because their sponsors are the same oil companies that are behind these policies.
While the idea of impeachment of Darth sounds so good to my soul the knowing Bush could apoint someone of the wingdings running for the repub nomination would be sneaked in the back door and be in a much better position to win the big job. That scares me more! The chimp and Darth have one year more to damage us and potentially destroy our country and Darth is doing all he can to make the worst happen to us. I have no idea what has been motivation for the war making this group has had but reality has not been at the source of their thought process. We cannot start a war with anyone else as there is no soldiers, no equipment, no money and the big one is there is absolutely not reason to go to war. Like Iraq, Iran has not attacked us. Like Iraq Iran can be contained by the worlds countries willing to hold Iran by sanctions. The sanctions would still be working in Iraq today had bush not ordered war instead of diplomats. Iraqi citizens have had wrong done to them by Saddam and his sons and there is no doubt they being gone has been a relief for the Iraqi but to look at the price they had and continue to pay for the decisions bush and cheney have made. They elected a government but cannot exercise anything in the government without bushes ok and I fail to see democracy being allowed to happen. Blackwater has done the worst to them in our name and unless darth cheney has decided to pay for the sewage compnay out of pocket to do Iran there is nothing left to fight with and I for one and with many stand to say no more war!
THE FALLACY OF NPR
Most free minded people, and liberal thinkers resort to NPR for their news and we often take their reports for truly fair and balanced, showing both sides of the issues. Closer inspection would reveal how the news is always biased towards one side and often omits critical information, perhaps not as blatantly as other news sources, but still, far from the real accurate news. Consider the atrocities committed by the occupation forces in Iraq at the Abu-Ghraib prison. Shortly after the news came out, the Bush administration labeled them as "prisoner abuse" and that was the only term that NPR used to refer to them thereafter. Now, let's see what constitutes "prisoner abuse" in the English language? Prisoner abuse would be something of the likes of shoving them around, kicking them on the rump-, that kind of treatment. To have a prisoner, shackled and treating him/her this way would be wrong and we would be right to label it an "abuse of prisoners". Placing electrodes to someone's genitalia and giving him electric shocks is torture and it cannot be labeled anything else. If you label those kinds of atrocities as "prisoner abuse", it really condones the action and allows the perpetrators to soften the atrocity and underplay what really happened. If we continue our analysis we see that NPR is consistently guilty of similar biases around other issues. For instance, it is not difficult to find reports about the Iranian president, the leader of Hezbollah or any other Persian or Arab officials. Notice how religiously NPR ends the report reporting with the statement that such person "does not recognize the right of Israel to exist".I am sure listeners can recall hearing this statement countless times; often towards the end of the report as a "take home message". Now, can we recall any broadcast that mentions that Israeli officials do not recognize the right of Palestine to exist? This is quite an omission because Israel's attitude towards Palestine is at the core of all the problems of the Middle East (Carter 2006)...
What I don't understand is the Cheney types constantly advance the argument that we must control the Middle East to protect our "strategic interests", which as everybody knows is what those who enrich themselves from it call our access to foreign oil.
Rephrased, our energy supply is so vital to our national interests that we not only must be but are willing to commit our armed forces - and thus American lives - towards protecting it.
That being the case, then why hasn't everybody who has ever helped stall or block funding for alternative energy research and/or the development and enforcement of conservation measures, both of which also serve to safeguard America's energy supply, been charged with treason?
The only rationale for not bringing charges of treason against someone who acts in such a manner is "But that's different; American corporations are making money from keeping us addicted to foreign oil.".
Which is in fact selling your nation out for money, the highest form of treason of all.
Gareth, I'm not saying anything until Mr ElBaradei gets some answers, which should be soon. Lets revisit this subject then, we can break down Cheney's BS then.
In the meantime lets impeach the bastard.
If you've got the stomach for it, you can head on over to BAgnewsNotes to see the miserable grinning chimp and the real cost of war. Bush is patting our soldiers on their heads.
It would make more sense to invade Saudi Arabia.
Cheap oil: and weren't the 911 suiciders Saudi ?
Congressman should talk to intelligence professionals in person to get the intelligence community's unedited views on Iranian manufacture of EFP's and the Iranian nuclear program.
It is criminal that Cheney should be allowed single-handedly to influence intelligence products and then disseminate a final draft that agrees with his views.
Bush and Cheney will, in the end, predictably put the final blame for faulty intelligence on the intelligence community and escape responsibilty for manipulating the final product.
The intelligence community is always a convenient scapegoat, in that they are pledged to secrecy. There should be a firewall between policy makers, like Cheney, and the intelligence community.
Congress should be allowed access to all drafts of an intelligence product.
The whole process of administration lies is taking place again because congress didn't look into how the intelligence was manipulated by the administration with regard to Iraq.
Cheney is employing the same tactics that were successful last time around. For a man who used five deferments to escape duty in Vietnam, he welcomes warfare.
We, the People of American held hostage for 14 more months.
How many oil fields does Iran have? The four US superbases in Iraq can serve the dual purpose of launch pad for stealing and holding Iranian oil fields with the direct intervention of BlackHawk mercenaries.
As if we needed another reason to impeach this guy. Someone should turn his pacemaker down to snooze and leave it stuck there for a couple years.
Why can't (won't) we impeach these evil bastards?!
Kucinich started the ball rolling with the HR333 articles of impeachment http://www
Now it's up to us citizens to put pressure on Congress and the Judiciary committee. I don't know if we'll succeed, but at least we will have tried. I don't know how we can sit around and complain about our representatives if we don't make sure they know what we want. Here are some links. Cheney and Bush really must be stopped
Write/Call the Judiciary committee and tell them you support HR333 and impeachment. http://jud
Write/Call Congress http://www
Sign on with the folks at Impeach Bush: http://www
And Vote for Kucinich! Let's take our country back from the bad guys and the hacks. If you want to learn more about Kucinich (and I recommend that you do) here's an excellent interview he did with Judy Woodruff on PBS. There are interviews with all the other candidates from both parties as well. http://www
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