After leading a completely illegal and immoral war in Iraq Mr. Bush wants to do it again, only this time he wants to violate international law and commit crimes against peace vis-a-viz Iran. His recent speeches, like the one reported upon today by the BBC (see below)contain proof of his bellicosity.
Ignoring the domestic economic meltdown and any issue that really matters to American citizens Mr. Bush is intoxicated by the idea of deceiving the American people again by telling scary lies about Iran. Despite the fundamentally good relations between the Iraqi government and Iran Mr. Bush wants to blame the slaughter of over a million Iraqis since the second invasion of Iraq on someone else. Yet it is the hands of Mr. Bush and the rump Congress that has always ratifies his illegal acts of war who have the blood of over a million Iraqis on their hands. Some Americans may not want to recognize these facts and they will be the ones most likely to embrace Mr. Bush's lies, lies that blame someone else for what the United States has done to ravage and pillage Iraq.
Yes, American troops are being killed in Iraq but the idea that Iran is somehow behind the resistance to the faltering American invasion is ludicrous. Only Mr. Bush and his clique want American troops to continue the effort to make Iraq into a failed state under the thumb of American oil interests.
Indeed, Iran could readily provide shoulder launched missiles and knock down dozens of helicopters a month. They haven't done it. Mr Ahmadinejad's comments about working with other nations in the region underlines the fact that it is only the United States that is promoting war in the Persian Gulf. Iran wants to work with other regional powers and is working with the Maliki government now.
As for Mr. Bush's concern about nuclear weapons in the region it seems he has forgotten that the only serious nuclear threat is the United States and Mr. Bush may very well plan to use nuclear weapons by provoking a war with Iran just as he did with Iraq.
Impeach Bush/Cheney to Prevent Nuclear War!
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
BBC NEWS
Bush warns Iran over insurgents
Bush attacks Iran
US President George W Bush has warned Iran to stop supporting the militants fighting against the US in Iraq.
In a speech to US war veterans in Reno, Nevada, Mr Bush renewed charges that Tehran has provided training and weapons for extremists in Iraq.
"The Iranian regime must halt these actions," he said.
Earlier, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned that US authority in the region was rapidly collapsing, and Iran would help fill the void.
"Soon, we will see a huge power vacuum in the region," Mr Ahmadinejad said.
"Of course, we are prepared to fill the gap, with the help of neighbours and regional friends like Saudi Arabia, and with the help of the Iraqi nation."
'Nuclear threat'
In his speech to the American Legion, Mr Bush hit back, accusing Iran's Revolutionary Guards of funding and arming insurgents in Iraq.
And he said Iran's leaders could not avoid some responsibility for attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.
"I have authorised our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities," he said.
HAVE YOUR SAY
Lots of accusations, but absolutely no evidence to support them. He's not even taking the trouble to make any evidence up this time!
David, Newcastle
The BBC's Justin Webb, in Washington, says this looks like a conscious effort by the White House to elevate the tension between Washington and Teheran to a new level.
Such an effort might be designed to avoid the need for armed conflict or might equally be an effort to bring that conflict about, our correspondent says.
In a wide-ranging speech, Mr Bush also tackled the issue of Iran's nuclear ambition - which Tehran insists is solely to provide power, but the US believes may be used to develop weapons.
Mr Bush said Tehran's pursuit of nuclear technology threatened to put the Middle East "under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust".
It was Mr Bush's second major speech on foreign policy in a week.
Correspondents say he is seeking to rally support for the so-called surge strategy of sending more troops to Iraq.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/6967502.stm
Published: 2007/08/28 21:47:38 GMT
© BBC MMVII
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Former CIA Analysts Discusses the threat of a Bush Instigated War against Iran
The following is an article from AlterNet preceded by a little commentary of my own.
It seems that Mr. McGovern has made a strong case for the idea that Mr. Bush will attack Iran because he is guided by a neoconservative groupthink belief that this will lead to happy outcomes. It seems utterly unrealistic to imagine that an air and missile war will lead to the Iranian Mullahs being overthrown as the neoconservative scenario predicts.
The neoconservatives may have a rosy scenario for a war with Iran. They certainly were ecstatic about the imagined benefits of invading Iraq. The catastrophic consequences in Iraq suggest that neoconservatives may also be delusional about the real consequences of a war on Iran. Mr. Bush has yet to suggest that anything has gone wrong with the war in Iraq and this indicates that he is still in the neoconservative-psychotic mode, denying reality.
Bush sees progress in Iraq and thinks of the whole invasion and occupation as a success. So it seems that he may be predisposed to more happy results as a result of invading Iran or at least bombing it, possibly with nuclear weapons.
Furthermore, I think Mr. McGovern has provided disturbing evidence that suggests that Mr. Bush is being directed by neoconservative hardliners like Dick Cheney while no longer getting advice from Rumsfeld who ironically may have left because he wanted to start dealing with reality in Iraq. I had also never heard that Rove may have balanced Cheney. That's one of the scariest things I've ever heard. But when you think about it Rove has dealt with polling facts and real world data to manipulate the public into supporting Republicans and not Democrats. So now this evidence based guy is gone and we are left with the most extreme and disconnected neoconservatives. Did Rove leave because he doesn't want to be associated with a war of aggression against Iran?
An attack in Iran is likely to lead to high military casualties and a shutdown of a great deal of middle eastern oil production. Iran is a nation that could shut-down a good deal of Middle East oil production and inflict thousands of casualties on troops deployed in the region. They have a lot of missiles and missiles generally cannot be shot down. Those missiles will hit aircraft carriers and any other ship they are aimed at. Imagine that! The entire Persian Gult navy sinking! That is to say that I agree with Mr. McGovern that Mr. Bush is delusional.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Are Bush & Co. Gearing Up to Attack Iran?
By Ray McGovern, AlterNet
Posted on August 23, 2007, Printed on August 26, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60493/
A shorter version of this article first appeared on Consortiumnews.com.
It is as though I'm back as an analyst at the CIA, trying to estimate the chances of an attack on Iran. The putative attacker, though, happens to be our own president.
It is precisely the kind of work we analysts used to do. And, while it is still a bit jarring to be turning our analytical tools on the U.S. leadership, it is by no means entirely new. For, of necessity, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been doing that for almost six years now -- ever since 9/11, when "everything changed."
Of necessity? Yes, because, with very few exceptions, American journalists put their jobs at grave risk if they expose things like fraudulent wars.
The craft of CIA analysis was designed to be an all-source operation, meaning that we analysts were responsible -- and held accountable -- for assimilating information from all sources and coming to judgments on what it all meant. We used data of various kinds, from the most sophisticated technical collection platforms, to spies, to -- not least -- open media.
Here I must reveal a trade secret and risk puncturing the mystique of intelligence analysis. Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media. It helps to have been trained -- as my contemporaries and I had the good fortune to be trained -- by past masters of the discipline of media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.
Reporting from informants
The above is in no way intended to minimize the value of intelligence collection by CIA case officers recruiting and running clandestine agents. For, though small in percentage of the whole nine yards available to be analyzed, information from such sources can often make a crucial contribution. Consider, for example, the daring recruitment in mid-2002 of Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, who was successfully "turned" into working for the CIA and quickly established his credibility. Sabri told us there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
My former colleagues, perhaps a bit naively, were quite sure this would come as a welcome relief to President George W. Bush and his advisers. Instead, they were told that the White House had no further interest in reporting from Sabri; rather, that the issue was not really WMD, it was "regime change." (Don't feel embarrassed if you did not know this; although it is publicly available, our corporate-owned, war profiteering media has largely suppressed this key story.)
One former colleague, operations officer-par-excellence Robert Baer, now reports (in this week's Time) that, according to his sources, the Bush/Cheney administration is winding up for a strike on Iran; that the administration's plan to put Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list points in the direction of such a strike; and that the delusional "neoconservative" thinking that still guides White House policy concludes that such an attack would lead to the fall of the clerics and the rise of a more friendly Iran.
Hold on, it gets even worse: Baer's sources tell him that administration officials are thinking that "as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran's nuclear facilities."
Rove and Snow: Going wobbly?
Our VIPS colleague Phil Geraldi, writing in The American Conservative, earlier noted that in the past Karl Rove has served as a counterweight to Vice President Dick Cheney, and may have tried to put the brakes on Cheney's death wish to expand the Middle East quagmire to Iran. And former Pentagon officer, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked shoulder to shoulder with some of the most devoted neocons just before the attack on Iraq, has put into words (on LewRockwell.com) speculation several of us have been indulging in with respect to Rove's departure.
In short, it seems possible that Rove, who is no one's dummy and would not want to be required to "spin" an unnecessary war on Iran, may have lost the battle with Cheney over the merits of a military strike on Iran, and only then decided -- or was urged -- to spend more time with his family. As for administration spokesperson Tony Snow, it seems equally possible that, before deciding he had to leave the White House to make more money, he concluded that his stomach could not withstand the challenge of conjuring up yet another Snow job to explain why Bush/Cheney needed to attack Iran. There is recent precedent for this kind of thing.
We now know that it was because former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld went wobbly on the Iraq war -- as can be seen in his Nov. 6, 2006, memo to the president -- that Rumsfeld was canned. (That was the day BEFORE the election.) In that memo, Rumsfeld called for a "major adjustment" in war policy. And so, Robert Gates, who had been waiting in the wings, was called to Crawford, given the test for malleability, hired, and dispatched by the president immediately to Iraq to weigh in heavily with the most senior U.S. generals (Abizaid and Casey). They had been saying, quite openly: Please, please, no more troops; a surge would simply give the Iraqis still more time and opportunity to diddle us while American troops continue to die. So much for the president always listening to his senior military commanders. And the bug of reality was infecting even Rumsfeld.
In his memo to the president, Rumsfeld suggested that U.S. generals "withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions -- cities, patrolling, etc.," and move troops to Kuwait to serve as a Quick Reaction Force. Bush, of course, chose to do just the opposite.
Our domesticated press has not yet been able to put two and two together on this story, so it has been left to investigative reporters like Robert Parry to do so. In his Aug. 17 essay, "Rumsfeld's Mysterious Resignation," Parry closes with this:
The touchy secret about Rumsfeld's departure seems to have been that Bush didn't want the American people to know that one of the chief Iraq war architects had turned against the idea of an open-ended military commitment -- and that Bush had found himself with no choice but to oust Rumsfeld for his loss of faith in the neoconservative cause.
Granted, it is speculative that similar factors, this time with respect to war planning for Iran, were at work in the decisions on the departure of Rove and Snow. Someone ought to ask them.
Surgical strikes first?
With the propaganda buildup we have seen so far on Iran, what seems most likely, at least initially, is an attack on Revolutionary Guard training facilities inside Iran. That can be done with cruise missiles. With some 20 targets already identified by anti-Iranian groups, there are enough assets already in place to do that job. But the "while-we're-at-it" neocon logic referred to above may well be applied after, or even in conjunction with, that kind of limited cruise missile attack.
Cheerleading in the domesticated media
Yes, it is happening again.
The lead editorial in yesterday's Washington Post regurgitates the allegations that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is "supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq," that it is "waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible." Designating Iran a "specially designated global terrorist" organization, says the Post, "seems to be the least the United States should be doing, giving the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq."
It's as though Dick Cheney and friends are again writing the Post's editorials. And not only that: arch-neocon James Woolsey told Lou Dobbs on Aug. 14 that the Nited States may have no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons program. As Woolsey puts it, "I'm afraid within, well, at worst, a few months, [or] at best, a few years, they could have the bomb."
Woolsey, self-described "anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs," has long been out in front plumbing for wars, like Iraq, that he and other neocons myopically see as being in Israel's, as well as America's, interest. On the evening of 9/11, Woolsey was already raising with Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings the notion that Iraq was a leading candidate for state sponsorship of the attacks. A day later, Woolsey told journalist James Fallows that, no matter who proved responsible for 9/11, the solution had to include removing Saddam Hussein because he was so likely to be involved the next time (sic).
The latest media hype is also rubbish. And Woolsey knows it. And so do reporters for the Washington Post, who are aware of, but have been forbidden to tell, a highly interesting story about waiting for a key National Intelligence Estimate -- as if for Godot.
The NIE that didn't bark
The latest National Intelligence Estimate regarding if and when Iran is likely to have the bomb has been ready since February. It has been sent back four times -- no doubt because its conclusions do not support what Cheney and Woolsey are telling the president and, through the domesticated press, telling the rest of us as well.
The conclusion of the most recent published NIE (early 2005) was that Iran probably could not acquire a nuclear weapon until "early to mid-next decade," a formula memorized and restated by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell at his confirmation hearing in February. One can safely assume that McConnell had been fully briefed on the first "final draft" of the new estimate, which has now been in limbo for half a year. And I would wager that the conclusions of the new estimate resemble those of the NIE of 2005 far too closely to suit Cheney.
It is a scandal that the congressional oversight committees have not been briefed on the conclusions of the new estimate, even though it cannot pass Cheney's smell test. For it is a safe bet it would give the lie to the claims of Cheney, Woolsey and other cheerleaders for war with Iran and provide powerful ammunition to those arguing for a more sensible approach to Iran.
But attacking Iran would be crazy
Despite the administration's warlike record, many Americans may still cling to the belief that attacking Iran won't happen because it would be crazy and that Bush is a lame-duck president who wouldn't dare undertake yet another reckless adventure when the last one went so badly.
But rationality and common sense have not exactly been the strong suit of this administration. Bush has placed himself in a neoconservative bubble that operates with its own false sense of reality. Worse still: as psychiatrist Justin Frank pointed out in the July 27 VIPS memo "Dangers of a Cornered Bush," updating his book, Bush on the Couch:
We are left with a president who cannot actually govern, because he is incapable of reasoned thought in coping with events outside his control, like those in the Middle East.
This makes it a monumental challenge -- as urgent as it is difficult -- not only to get him to stop the carnage in the Middle East, but also to prevent him from undertaking a new, perhaps even more disastrous adventure -- like going to war with Iran in order to embellish the image he so proudly created for himself after 9/11 as the commander in chief of 'the first war of the 21st century.'
Scary.
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/60493/
It seems that Mr. McGovern has made a strong case for the idea that Mr. Bush will attack Iran because he is guided by a neoconservative groupthink belief that this will lead to happy outcomes. It seems utterly unrealistic to imagine that an air and missile war will lead to the Iranian Mullahs being overthrown as the neoconservative scenario predicts.
The neoconservatives may have a rosy scenario for a war with Iran. They certainly were ecstatic about the imagined benefits of invading Iraq. The catastrophic consequences in Iraq suggest that neoconservatives may also be delusional about the real consequences of a war on Iran. Mr. Bush has yet to suggest that anything has gone wrong with the war in Iraq and this indicates that he is still in the neoconservative-psychotic mode, denying reality.
Bush sees progress in Iraq and thinks of the whole invasion and occupation as a success. So it seems that he may be predisposed to more happy results as a result of invading Iran or at least bombing it, possibly with nuclear weapons.
Furthermore, I think Mr. McGovern has provided disturbing evidence that suggests that Mr. Bush is being directed by neoconservative hardliners like Dick Cheney while no longer getting advice from Rumsfeld who ironically may have left because he wanted to start dealing with reality in Iraq. I had also never heard that Rove may have balanced Cheney. That's one of the scariest things I've ever heard. But when you think about it Rove has dealt with polling facts and real world data to manipulate the public into supporting Republicans and not Democrats. So now this evidence based guy is gone and we are left with the most extreme and disconnected neoconservatives. Did Rove leave because he doesn't want to be associated with a war of aggression against Iran?
An attack in Iran is likely to lead to high military casualties and a shutdown of a great deal of middle eastern oil production. Iran is a nation that could shut-down a good deal of Middle East oil production and inflict thousands of casualties on troops deployed in the region. They have a lot of missiles and missiles generally cannot be shot down. Those missiles will hit aircraft carriers and any other ship they are aimed at. Imagine that! The entire Persian Gult navy sinking! That is to say that I agree with Mr. McGovern that Mr. Bush is delusional.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Are Bush & Co. Gearing Up to Attack Iran?
By Ray McGovern, AlterNet
Posted on August 23, 2007, Printed on August 26, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60493/
A shorter version of this article first appeared on Consortiumnews.com.
It is as though I'm back as an analyst at the CIA, trying to estimate the chances of an attack on Iran. The putative attacker, though, happens to be our own president.
It is precisely the kind of work we analysts used to do. And, while it is still a bit jarring to be turning our analytical tools on the U.S. leadership, it is by no means entirely new. For, of necessity, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been doing that for almost six years now -- ever since 9/11, when "everything changed."
Of necessity? Yes, because, with very few exceptions, American journalists put their jobs at grave risk if they expose things like fraudulent wars.
The craft of CIA analysis was designed to be an all-source operation, meaning that we analysts were responsible -- and held accountable -- for assimilating information from all sources and coming to judgments on what it all meant. We used data of various kinds, from the most sophisticated technical collection platforms, to spies, to -- not least -- open media.
Here I must reveal a trade secret and risk puncturing the mystique of intelligence analysis. Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media. It helps to have been trained -- as my contemporaries and I had the good fortune to be trained -- by past masters of the discipline of media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.
Reporting from informants
The above is in no way intended to minimize the value of intelligence collection by CIA case officers recruiting and running clandestine agents. For, though small in percentage of the whole nine yards available to be analyzed, information from such sources can often make a crucial contribution. Consider, for example, the daring recruitment in mid-2002 of Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, who was successfully "turned" into working for the CIA and quickly established his credibility. Sabri told us there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
My former colleagues, perhaps a bit naively, were quite sure this would come as a welcome relief to President George W. Bush and his advisers. Instead, they were told that the White House had no further interest in reporting from Sabri; rather, that the issue was not really WMD, it was "regime change." (Don't feel embarrassed if you did not know this; although it is publicly available, our corporate-owned, war profiteering media has largely suppressed this key story.)
One former colleague, operations officer-par-excellence Robert Baer, now reports (in this week's Time) that, according to his sources, the Bush/Cheney administration is winding up for a strike on Iran; that the administration's plan to put Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list points in the direction of such a strike; and that the delusional "neoconservative" thinking that still guides White House policy concludes that such an attack would lead to the fall of the clerics and the rise of a more friendly Iran.
Hold on, it gets even worse: Baer's sources tell him that administration officials are thinking that "as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran's nuclear facilities."
Rove and Snow: Going wobbly?
Our VIPS colleague Phil Geraldi, writing in The American Conservative, earlier noted that in the past Karl Rove has served as a counterweight to Vice President Dick Cheney, and may have tried to put the brakes on Cheney's death wish to expand the Middle East quagmire to Iran. And former Pentagon officer, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked shoulder to shoulder with some of the most devoted neocons just before the attack on Iraq, has put into words (on LewRockwell.com) speculation several of us have been indulging in with respect to Rove's departure.
In short, it seems possible that Rove, who is no one's dummy and would not want to be required to "spin" an unnecessary war on Iran, may have lost the battle with Cheney over the merits of a military strike on Iran, and only then decided -- or was urged -- to spend more time with his family. As for administration spokesperson Tony Snow, it seems equally possible that, before deciding he had to leave the White House to make more money, he concluded that his stomach could not withstand the challenge of conjuring up yet another Snow job to explain why Bush/Cheney needed to attack Iran. There is recent precedent for this kind of thing.
We now know that it was because former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld went wobbly on the Iraq war -- as can be seen in his Nov. 6, 2006, memo to the president -- that Rumsfeld was canned. (That was the day BEFORE the election.) In that memo, Rumsfeld called for a "major adjustment" in war policy. And so, Robert Gates, who had been waiting in the wings, was called to Crawford, given the test for malleability, hired, and dispatched by the president immediately to Iraq to weigh in heavily with the most senior U.S. generals (Abizaid and Casey). They had been saying, quite openly: Please, please, no more troops; a surge would simply give the Iraqis still more time and opportunity to diddle us while American troops continue to die. So much for the president always listening to his senior military commanders. And the bug of reality was infecting even Rumsfeld.
In his memo to the president, Rumsfeld suggested that U.S. generals "withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions -- cities, patrolling, etc.," and move troops to Kuwait to serve as a Quick Reaction Force. Bush, of course, chose to do just the opposite.
Our domesticated press has not yet been able to put two and two together on this story, so it has been left to investigative reporters like Robert Parry to do so. In his Aug. 17 essay, "Rumsfeld's Mysterious Resignation," Parry closes with this:
The touchy secret about Rumsfeld's departure seems to have been that Bush didn't want the American people to know that one of the chief Iraq war architects had turned against the idea of an open-ended military commitment -- and that Bush had found himself with no choice but to oust Rumsfeld for his loss of faith in the neoconservative cause.
Granted, it is speculative that similar factors, this time with respect to war planning for Iran, were at work in the decisions on the departure of Rove and Snow. Someone ought to ask them.
Surgical strikes first?
With the propaganda buildup we have seen so far on Iran, what seems most likely, at least initially, is an attack on Revolutionary Guard training facilities inside Iran. That can be done with cruise missiles. With some 20 targets already identified by anti-Iranian groups, there are enough assets already in place to do that job. But the "while-we're-at-it" neocon logic referred to above may well be applied after, or even in conjunction with, that kind of limited cruise missile attack.
Cheerleading in the domesticated media
Yes, it is happening again.
The lead editorial in yesterday's Washington Post regurgitates the allegations that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is "supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq," that it is "waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible." Designating Iran a "specially designated global terrorist" organization, says the Post, "seems to be the least the United States should be doing, giving the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq."
It's as though Dick Cheney and friends are again writing the Post's editorials. And not only that: arch-neocon James Woolsey told Lou Dobbs on Aug. 14 that the Nited States may have no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons program. As Woolsey puts it, "I'm afraid within, well, at worst, a few months, [or] at best, a few years, they could have the bomb."
Woolsey, self-described "anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs," has long been out in front plumbing for wars, like Iraq, that he and other neocons myopically see as being in Israel's, as well as America's, interest. On the evening of 9/11, Woolsey was already raising with Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings the notion that Iraq was a leading candidate for state sponsorship of the attacks. A day later, Woolsey told journalist James Fallows that, no matter who proved responsible for 9/11, the solution had to include removing Saddam Hussein because he was so likely to be involved the next time (sic).
The latest media hype is also rubbish. And Woolsey knows it. And so do reporters for the Washington Post, who are aware of, but have been forbidden to tell, a highly interesting story about waiting for a key National Intelligence Estimate -- as if for Godot.
The NIE that didn't bark
The latest National Intelligence Estimate regarding if and when Iran is likely to have the bomb has been ready since February. It has been sent back four times -- no doubt because its conclusions do not support what Cheney and Woolsey are telling the president and, through the domesticated press, telling the rest of us as well.
The conclusion of the most recent published NIE (early 2005) was that Iran probably could not acquire a nuclear weapon until "early to mid-next decade," a formula memorized and restated by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell at his confirmation hearing in February. One can safely assume that McConnell had been fully briefed on the first "final draft" of the new estimate, which has now been in limbo for half a year. And I would wager that the conclusions of the new estimate resemble those of the NIE of 2005 far too closely to suit Cheney.
It is a scandal that the congressional oversight committees have not been briefed on the conclusions of the new estimate, even though it cannot pass Cheney's smell test. For it is a safe bet it would give the lie to the claims of Cheney, Woolsey and other cheerleaders for war with Iran and provide powerful ammunition to those arguing for a more sensible approach to Iran.
But attacking Iran would be crazy
Despite the administration's warlike record, many Americans may still cling to the belief that attacking Iran won't happen because it would be crazy and that Bush is a lame-duck president who wouldn't dare undertake yet another reckless adventure when the last one went so badly.
But rationality and common sense have not exactly been the strong suit of this administration. Bush has placed himself in a neoconservative bubble that operates with its own false sense of reality. Worse still: as psychiatrist Justin Frank pointed out in the July 27 VIPS memo "Dangers of a Cornered Bush," updating his book, Bush on the Couch:
We are left with a president who cannot actually govern, because he is incapable of reasoned thought in coping with events outside his control, like those in the Middle East.
This makes it a monumental challenge -- as urgent as it is difficult -- not only to get him to stop the carnage in the Middle East, but also to prevent him from undertaking a new, perhaps even more disastrous adventure -- like going to war with Iran in order to embellish the image he so proudly created for himself after 9/11 as the commander in chief of 'the first war of the 21st century.'
Scary.
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/60493/
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Paul Craig Roberts on Probable Bush Overthrow of our Constitutional System
This is Paul Craig Roberts's scenario for a Bush-Cheney overthrow of our Constitutional government in the midst of a staged crisis.
I have had similar concerns although some of the particulars have been different. I have been particularly concerned that the private contractors in Iraq might be brought back here to form a sort of skeleton for fascist government operations directed against United States citizens during the implementation of dictatorial rule. Will Congress stand in their way? Recent legislation authorizing Mr. Bush's hitherto illegal spying on millions of Americans suggests otherwise.
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/070715_impeach.htm
July 15, 2007
Impeach Bush And Cheney Now
By Paul Craig Roberts
Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.
Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of "executive orders" that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, "terrorist" events in the near future.
Many attentive people believe that the reason the Bush administration will not bow to expert advice and public opinion and begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq is that the administration intends to rescue its unpopular position with false flag operations that can be used to expand the war to Iran.
Too much is going wrong for the Bush administration: the failure of its Middle East wars, Republican senators jumping ship, Turkish troops massed on northern Iraq's border poised for an invasion to deal with Kurds, and a majority of Americans favoring the impeachment of Cheney and a near-majority favoring Bush's impeachment. The Bush administration desperately needs dramatic events to scare the American people and the Congress back in line with the militarist- police state that Bush and Cheney have fostered.
William Norman Grigg recently wrote that the GOP is "praying for a terrorist strike" to save the party from electoral wipeout in 2008. Chertoff, Cheney, the neocon nazis, and Mossad would have no qualms about saving the bacon for the Republicans, who have enabled Bush to start two unjustified wars, with Iran waiting in the wings to be attacked in a third war.
The Bush administration has tried unsuccessfully to resurrect the terrorist fear factor by infiltrating some blowhard groups and encouraging them to talk about staging "terrorist" events. The talk, encouraged by federal agents, resulted in "terrorist" arrests hyped by the media, but even the captive media was unable to scare people with such transparent sting operations.
If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.
A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconservatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.
Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?[Homeland Security chief warns of 'increased risk’ Chertoff bases 'gut feeling' on history, Al Qaeda statements By E.A. Torriero ,July 11, 2007]
Why would Republican warmonger Rick Santorum say on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that "between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public's (sic) going to have a very different view of this war."
Throughout its existence the US government has staged incidents that the government then used in behalf of purposes that it could not otherwise have pursued. According to a number of writers, false flag operations have been routinely used by the Israeli state. During the Czarist era in Russia, the secret police would set off bombs in order to arrest those the secret police regarded as troublesome. Hitler was a dramatic orchestrator of false flag operations. False flag operations are a commonplace tool of governments.
Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?
Only a diehard minority believes in the honesty and integrity of the Bush-Cheney administration and in the truthfulness of the corporate media.
Hitler, who never achieved majority support in a German election, used the Reichstag fire to fan hysteria and push through the Enabling Act, which made him dictator. Determined tyrants never require majority support in order to overthrow constitutional orders.
The American constitutional system is near to being overthrown. Are coming "terrorist" events of which Chertoff warns and Santorum promises the means for overthrowing our constitutional democracy?
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
I have had similar concerns although some of the particulars have been different. I have been particularly concerned that the private contractors in Iraq might be brought back here to form a sort of skeleton for fascist government operations directed against United States citizens during the implementation of dictatorial rule. Will Congress stand in their way? Recent legislation authorizing Mr. Bush's hitherto illegal spying on millions of Americans suggests otherwise.
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/070715_impeach.htm
July 15, 2007
Impeach Bush And Cheney Now
By Paul Craig Roberts
Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.
Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of "executive orders" that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, "terrorist" events in the near future.
Many attentive people believe that the reason the Bush administration will not bow to expert advice and public opinion and begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq is that the administration intends to rescue its unpopular position with false flag operations that can be used to expand the war to Iran.
Too much is going wrong for the Bush administration: the failure of its Middle East wars, Republican senators jumping ship, Turkish troops massed on northern Iraq's border poised for an invasion to deal with Kurds, and a majority of Americans favoring the impeachment of Cheney and a near-majority favoring Bush's impeachment. The Bush administration desperately needs dramatic events to scare the American people and the Congress back in line with the militarist- police state that Bush and Cheney have fostered.
William Norman Grigg recently wrote that the GOP is "praying for a terrorist strike" to save the party from electoral wipeout in 2008. Chertoff, Cheney, the neocon nazis, and Mossad would have no qualms about saving the bacon for the Republicans, who have enabled Bush to start two unjustified wars, with Iran waiting in the wings to be attacked in a third war.
The Bush administration has tried unsuccessfully to resurrect the terrorist fear factor by infiltrating some blowhard groups and encouraging them to talk about staging "terrorist" events. The talk, encouraged by federal agents, resulted in "terrorist" arrests hyped by the media, but even the captive media was unable to scare people with such transparent sting operations.
If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.
A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconservatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.
Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?[Homeland Security chief warns of 'increased risk’ Chertoff bases 'gut feeling' on history, Al Qaeda statements By E.A. Torriero ,July 11, 2007]
Why would Republican warmonger Rick Santorum say on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that "between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public's (sic) going to have a very different view of this war."
Throughout its existence the US government has staged incidents that the government then used in behalf of purposes that it could not otherwise have pursued. According to a number of writers, false flag operations have been routinely used by the Israeli state. During the Czarist era in Russia, the secret police would set off bombs in order to arrest those the secret police regarded as troublesome. Hitler was a dramatic orchestrator of false flag operations. False flag operations are a commonplace tool of governments.
Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?
Only a diehard minority believes in the honesty and integrity of the Bush-Cheney administration and in the truthfulness of the corporate media.
Hitler, who never achieved majority support in a German election, used the Reichstag fire to fan hysteria and push through the Enabling Act, which made him dictator. Determined tyrants never require majority support in order to overthrow constitutional orders.
The American constitutional system is near to being overthrown. Are coming "terrorist" events of which Chertoff warns and Santorum promises the means for overthrowing our constitutional democracy?
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
Monday, August 20, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH-CHENEY TO PREVENT NUCLEAR WAR
It is difficult to predict the future with any degree of accuracy. Nonetheless the drumbeat and campaign to attack Iran has clearly begun. It appears that a decision has been made to make yet another war of aggression against an oil rich nation. Iran has the capability and disciplined troops to genuinely inflict damage upon United States military forces and oil installations throughout the region. In response, Mr. Bush will use nuclear weapons and declare a state of emergency, 2008 elections will be cancelled.
A former Reagan economist has essentially expressed the same sort of scenario. My point is that an impeachment movement, a grass roots movement that won't take no for an answer could hamstring the apolacalyptic leaders in the White House.
Remember, impeachment would put the Bush-Cheney administration on the defensive Their many acts of violence and corruption
would be opened for public exposure. The Senate may or may not convict but the Bush-Cheney clique could be weakened enough to prevent their plans for nuclear war.
A former Reagan economist has essentially expressed the same sort of scenario. My point is that an impeachment movement, a grass roots movement that won't take no for an answer could hamstring the apolacalyptic leaders in the White House.
Remember, impeachment would put the Bush-Cheney administration on the defensive Their many acts of violence and corruption
would be opened for public exposure. The Senate may or may not convict but the Bush-Cheney clique could be weakened enough to prevent their plans for nuclear war.
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