http://www.atlargely.com/…
from At-Largely by Larisa Alexandrovna

So, remember how there was that official National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran that basically undercut the Bush administration’s propaganda for why WWIII was needed? If you recall, the NIE is a consensus among all 16 US intelligence agencies and departments.

As a human, you likely know that to get 16 of your closest friends to agree on anything is nearly impossible. So imagine what it would take for 16 smaller bureaucracies inside a huge multi-layered bureaucracy to reach a consensus on anything, let alone something as complex as the Iranian threat. But they did reach that needed consensus and it was released after Dick Cheney’s office sat on it for a year. What followed was near hysteria from the White House over a politicized (16 agencies?) intelligence report.

Well, the White House has managed to once again “fix the facts” around the bullshit in the form of Mike McConnell (emphasis mine):

“This week’s Annual Threat Assessment appearance on Capitol Hill by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, seemed to stand in contrast to two months ago, when the public version of a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran blew up a policy storm with its conclusion—in spite of heated rhetoric to the contrary—that Iran had halted its work on how to design and build a nuclear warhead way back in 2003.

It was as though the lyrics were much the same as in the recent past, but the tone of the music had darkened noticeably.

The initial release of the NIE created a huge political and diplomatic problem for the Bush administration just as it was attempting to galvanize international support for an additional round of U.N. economic sanctions against Iran. In Washington, it was pilloried by hard-liners—some in and some outside the administration—and slammed by a variety of former nonproliferation and intelligence officials as misleading and badly constructed.

So last week, when McConnell got to the Iran file, the NIE’s findings seemed to be repackaged in a way that emphasized a sense of undiminished threat and suspicion of Iran’s long-term nuclear ambitions. McConnell stressed what many critics said the December NIE should have—that Iran, albeit under international monitoring, continues to move forward on the single most important part of attaining a nuclear-weapons capability: learning how to enrich uranium. The intel chief also focused on Tehran’s efforts to perfect and deploy ballistic missiles that would be able to reach North Africa and Europe.“

So you see, you don’t go to war with the NIE you have, because you can’t justify the war you are planning. No, if you are the Bush-Cheney cabal, you simply fabricate the NIE you need to justify the war you want. Here is how it works:

You worry about the consequences of fixing the facts around the lies later, when the public actually gets wise to the scam. You first get your war and commit the troops, knowing full well that once there, it will be difficult to extricate them.

Once that mission is accomplished, then all you - the Bush-Cheney cabal - have to do is simply appoint an independent body to conduct an investigation on the straw-man notion of why you were misled into attacking another nation. You - the Bush-Cheney cabal - know you were not misled. Congress knows you were not misled. A good number of rational creatures on the planet know that you were not misled. But the point of this investigation is not to tell the truth, rather it is about continuing the lie.

So, the independent investigation unsurprisingly concludes that you, the Bush-Cheney cabal, are not at fault at all. No, it was the fault of 16 US intelligence bureaucracies, inside a bigger, multi-layered bureaucracy, that tricked you - the Bush-Cheney cabal into launching an illegal war against a nation posing no threat to the United States.
It need not matter that prior to the Iraq war, the CIA, and every other US intelligence agency and department said that there were no WMD in Iraq. The point is that you, the Bush-Cheney cabal got your war. Now we see the same song being played on the same rotting stage with regard to Iran, with the refrain of course being “no one could have imagined.”

Posted by Larisa Alexandrovna on February 06, 2008 at 03:44 PM