NIE Report on Iran

Is it not astonishing to watch the smarm coming out of the White House in response to the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which reported that Iran is NOT working on a nuclear weapon, and in fact ended its nuclear weapons efforts in 2003? Is it not mind-boggling to see the President at a new conference assuring us that far from contradicting the saber-rattling blather that he has been hyping for months—recently raising the specter of WWIII if Iran were to get the “knowledge” to build a bomb—the NIE report just confirms and reinforces his suspicions of Iran? And further to see, in response to a question about the timing of his WWIII comment, the President smirking (as he always does when he’s lying) and insisting that he didn’t know about this report when he made his remarks, because he only found out this week?

I mean, have they no shame? No discomfort to be caught lying through their teeth, to the point where their whole Iran policy is revealed as yet another fraud? Apparently not. Because in the first place, Commondreams.org has just rerun a story dated Nov. 9, 2007 by Inter Press Service that literally doubles the fraud:

“A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear program, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran….”

In other words, the report that the public just read about yesterday was not only ready to be published A YEAR AGO, but the President knew it and tried to quash it entirely. Failing that, he had it sent back three times to modify it so as to conform with the administration’s attempt to create enough fear about Iran to justify a military strike on its “secret” nuclear-building operations.

And now that the intelligence experts have refused to bow to administration pressure, and have directly (though a year late) contradicted the administration’s propaganda about those “secret” operations, the President and his minions in Congress, without batting an eye, contend that the report actually substantiates their view that Iran was working on nukes before, and will be working on them again.

So, where any rational human being would interpret the NIE report as exposing Cheney and his neocon henchmen as the fools that they are, the report is tortured to resemble new evidence against the alleged nuclear devils in Tehran.

In short, evidence means nothing to the adolescent fascists in the White House. Determined to paint Iran as a rogue nation deserving of a pre-emptive strike, they will reinterpret, undermine and make up their own intelligence to do it. And of course one of the ways they do this is to keep repeating the other durable lie—that President Ahmadinejad of Iran “intends to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.” In regard to which Marjorie Cohn pointed out recently,

“According to University of Michigan professor Juan Cole and Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, who said the “regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” Cole said this “does not imply military action or killing anyone at all.” (commondreams.org, Nov. 25, 2007)

Rather, it means that the Iranians predict (and devoutly hope) that the Zionist regime will sooner or later disappear. Anyone familiar with the history of Israel and the Middle East would be hard pressed to disagree. But language, like truth, means nothing to the Bushies. Or rather, it represents just another tool to be tortured and twisted to create the impression of constant crisis, to instill fear in the populace, and to use that fear to justify the loss of liberty at home and “pre-emptive” aggression abroad.

So beware. Even though its own intelligence has confirmed that the so-called nuclear danger from Iran was, and is pure bullshit (as was the similar hype over Iraq’s WMD), the sociopaths in this White House have proven that they not only have no shame, they lack even the minimal conscience needed to be embarrassed, much less dissuaded from their criminal designs.

Lawrence DiStasi