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Iran NIE Finally "Finished"?

According to Gareth Porter, the intelligence agencies and Dick Cheney's office have wrestled to a tie on Iran:

The US 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. The aim is to make the document more supportive of Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts provided by participants in the NIE process to two former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers.
But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the "unsatisfactory" draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.

The rest.

Here are the conclusions of the two government "investigations" of whether the Bush administration pressured the intelligence agencies on Iraq. First, the Senate Intelligence Committee:

The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

And the WMD Commission:

The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs.

Look for the reports on how there was no pressure re Iran in early 2011.

Comments

And of course, as the Cheney administration continues to gin up "crap intelligence" on the Iranian threat, they continue to willfully ignore all of this:

www.asecondlookatthesaudis.com

Why is it that these people seem hell-bent on attacking every country in the Middle East, except the one actually responsible for the rise of Al Qaeda, the attacks on 9/11, and the suicide bombings killing our soldiers and reaping havoc in Iraq?

Posted by: Bill in Chicago on 11/11/07 at 11:24 AM Respond

Bill, Israel is uncomfortable with Iran getting nuclear weapons. Israel has over 200 and does not want to give up its monopoly. The Jews have given much money to the political parties, they expect a return on their investments. War is coming.

Posted by: JohnnyBoy on 11/11/07 at 12:14 PM Respond

I'm sure that's right, and not just because of the nuclear threat per se. Are we really to believe the Iranians would nuke Tel Aviv - so their Palestinian pals can spend the next 100 years dropping dead of cancer? No, I think the fear is clearly that an Iranian bomb would create some sort of nuclear stalemate, allowing the Iranians and/or Hezbollah to become more aggressive on the conventional front.

But all of that strikes me as somewhat academic. Even assuming that fighting Israel's wars for it (in particular, when they seem plenty capable of defending themselves) is a prudent course of action, shouldn't we be defending ourselves against the threat we saw materialize on 9/11 first?

Yet the administration will not even acknowledge where these attacks are coming from. How many times has this President prattled on about the "suiciders" in Iraq - without ever mentioning the fact that time and again they seem to be coming from the exact same country as those 9/11 hijackers. Indeed, I went to the White House website a while back and ran a search for "Wahhabis". Not a single hit!

It seems to me this administration has not only been grossly incompetent and twisted in it's prosecution of the War on Terror, but downright treasonous.

Posted by: Bill in Chicago on 11/11/07 at 1:15 PM Respond

Bill, the whole 911 and war of terrorism is a hoax. BenLaden's gang just got a lucky hit. The CFR just took advantage of the situation. The rest is history. The Democrats support the funding as well, they like the pay offs. We have no power, just sit back and enjoy the ride. P.S. remember to "vote early and often".

Posted by: JohnnyBoy on 11/11/07 at 4:45 PM Respond