-Caveat Lector-
http://antiwar.com/justin/
November 22, 2004
The Lying Game, Revisited Iran has nukes they really really do! Scout's honor! Cross my heart and hope to die!
by Justin Raimondo
We live in a recurring nightmare. That's the only conclusion one can draw from today's headlines, which, as we draw closer to a confrontation with Iran, bear an eerie resemblance to yesterday's breaking news. It seems like only yesterday that a Middle Eastern exile group the Iraqi National Congress (INC) was feeding the U.S. government "intelligence" that drew a fearsome portrait of Saddam Hussein's supposedly burgeoning nuclear arsenal. The Iraqi dictator was said to be plotting with Al Qaeda to knock off a few more American skyscrapers, and, at one point, George W. Bush even conjured visions of Iraqi drones flying over our airspace and raining death and destruction on American cities.
While readers of Antiwar.com discovered early on it was all a lie, a good deal of the rest of the world was led down the primrose path and only stumbled over the truth after they had reached the very end.
But is it the end or is the path just branching out in another direction?
The startling announcement by lame-duck Secretary of State Colin Powell that Iran contrary to its public declarations, and the spirit if not the letter of Tehran's recent preliminary agreement with the EU to temporarily halt the uranium enrichment process is working on a nuclear missile delivery system has Washington in a frenzy of speculation, and, yes, shock. The latter is over Powell's extraordinary willingness to reveal information that was reportedly unvetted, and from a single source, and repeat it as fact.
The provenance of this bit of "intelligence" ought to evoke, in the careful reader, a sense of déjà vu. Here is the Washington Post on the mysterious circumstances of its arrival on Powell's desk:
"According to one official with access to the material, a 'walk-in' source approached U.S intelligence earlier this month with more than 1,000 pages purported to be Iranian drawings and technical documents, including a nuclear warhead design and modifications to enable Iranian ballistic missiles to deliver an atomic strike."
This is reminiscent of nothing so much as the infamous Niger uranium forgeries, which, you'll remember, were accepted as fact by the Bush White House until they were exposed as fraudulent by International Atomic Energy Agency scientists, after a few hours with Google.
I wonder if the U.S. government would be interested in what a "walk-in" has to say about the overwhelming lack of evidence that Iran is building or intends to build nuclear weapons and how long it would take for 1000-plus pages of debunking to percolate up to the office of the secretary of state. In all likelihood, the debunker probably wouldn't get past the front door, let alone be lent credence by top officials.
Porter Goss has put a memo out to all of our spooks deploring leaks and warning Company employees to stop haunting this administration with doubts about American policy in the Middle East, or anywhere else for that matter. In a manner of hours the memo was on the internet (hat tip to Laura Rozen):
"We are a secret Agency. Of necessity, we must assiduously follow the law to honor the trust placed upon us. We have rules to govern our conduct of business and rules designed to facilitate our mission's success and to build public confidence. Since 9/11 everything has changed. The IC and its people have been relentlessly scrutinized and criticized. Intelligence related issues have become the fodder of partisan food fights and turf-power skirmishes.
"
I also intend to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road. We support the Administration and its policies in our work. As Agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the Administration or its policies. We provide the intelligence as we see it - and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker." [Emphasis in original]
A word to the wise: just tell us what we want to hear. Under these circumstances, perhaps as part of the re-organization and "reform" of our intelligence capabilities, we ought to re-name the CIA. How about the Central Propaganda Agency? Or, better yet, the Ministry of Truth
.
A three-pronged propaganda campaign is now underway to justify a preemptive military strike either by the U.S., or Israel against Iran's alleged nuclear weapons facilities. It just so happened that, on the very day Powell blurted out his accusation against Iran, a Paris-based Iranian exile group, the "National Council of Resistance," held a widely-publicized press conference stating that Iran is continuing to enrich uranium and claiming that, sometime in the mid-1990s, Tehran acquired a bomb blueprint from Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. As the Los Angeles Times points out, "many of the group's previous statements have been inaccurate, though it
