Wednesday, February 08, 2006

White House Takes Iran Propaganda To New Low

The White House, in the most egregious example of abuse of intelligence seen since the "disputed" Iraq WMD data, has conducted a document dump of questionable provenance to the always credulous Washington Post.

It does, however, mark a new low in the propaganda drumbeat towards war with Iran.

The cache of documents that are being peddled to journalists by the White House comes, according to the story, from a laptop computer that came into the possession of one of our many intelligence agencies after being "stolen by an Iranian citizen."

The improbability of that cover story and the fact that if the story contained even a morsel of truth it would not be appearing in a newspaper escapes no one except the Tom Clancy crowd.

I briefly looked to try to find our intrepid thief's name in the article, but the WaPo held that back for operational reasons.

U.S. intelligence considers the laptop documents authentic but cannot prove it. Analysts cannot completely rule out the possibility that internal opponents of the Iranian leadership could have forged them to implicate the government, or that the documents were planted by Tehran itself to convince the West that its program remains at an immature stage. CIA analysts, some of whom had been involved only a year earlier on the flawed assessments of Iraq's weapons programs, initially speculated that a third country, such as Israel, may have fabricated the evidence. But they eventually discounted that theory.

British intelligence, asked for a second opinion, concurred last year that the documents appear authentic. German and French officials consider the information troubling, sources said, but Russian experts have dismissed it as inconclusive. IAEA inspectors, who were highly skeptical of U.S. intelligence on Iraq, have begun to pursue aspects of the laptop information that appear to bolster previous leads.

"There is always a chance this could be the biggest scam perpetrated on U.S. intelligence," one U.S. source acknowledged. "But it's such a large body of documents and such strong indications of nuclear weapons intent, and nothing seems so inconsistent."

The administration is so hell-bent to convince Americans that Iran poses a "clear and present (nuclear) danger" that they ignore the absence of the basic material needed to build a bomb:

Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the IAEA, said that after three years of investigation, he still cannot judge Iran's program "exclusively peaceful." At the same time, Iran is "not an imminent threat," he said in a recent interview. "To develop a nuclear weapon, you need a significant quantity of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, and no one has seen that in Iran."

U.S. intelligence experts who helped craft an assessment of Iran's program last year have based their judgments on just that. Until Iran is able to operate an industrial-scale centrifuge cascade for the production of bomb-grade uranium, the country will remain as much as 10 years away from a weapon...

That assessment, by an intelligence community determined not to repeat the embarrassments of Iraq, is more conservative than views expressed by some policymakers. Some in the Bush administration have begun pushing back, suggesting that the CIA is demanding an unrealistically high standard of evidence before reaching conclusions that the White House believes are obvious.

"Taking into account the assessments made by the intelligence community, and others, I just don't have a lot of confidence in the assessments," said a senior administration official who was heavily involved in guiding the White House's use of intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs.

It looks to me like "confidence" is not high within the intelligence community about these documents.

The only possible reason that anyone would be allowed to release them publicly would be that they are fake.

Fake documents work just fine in propaganda operations.

7 Comments:

Blogger vcthree said...

Where have we seen this movie before? Made up intel, followed by bullshitting the U.N, then the threat, then the bombs. It sounds like a script I've seen before, but I can't seem to place it. As I recall, I didn't much like that movie either. Now if I could only think of the name...

2/08/2006 5:45 PM  
Blogger Effwit said...

vcthree:

Was it Groundhog Day?

;-)

2/08/2006 6:06 PM  
Blogger DrewL said...

Yes, I do believe I hear the familiar strains of "I've Got You, Babe" in the background on this. Living the same old story all over again.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Sadly, a large percentage of the U.S. population is made up of fools.

On a related note, I read a somewhat condensed version of this article in this morning's Dallas Morning News. Interestingly, the following two sentences were edited out:

"CIA analysts, some of whom had been involved only a year earlier on the flawed assessments of Iraq's weapons programs, initially speculated that a third country, such as Israel, may have fabricated the evidence. But they eventually discounted that theory."

Strange.

2/08/2006 11:26 PM  
Blogger M1 said...

Now that's the kinda comparative reading that gets you everywhere EFFWIT. Excellent observation on the Dallas rag version. It hints to a good archeologist what the process and intent behind these finds are.

Iran's position on the evolutionary scale of acquiring big bombs hasn't accelerated one peanut closer to having one.

Sure they want one but they remain far from it and our response facilities to them actually someday being on the cusp of acquiring one remain, as always, lightening fast (just ask Wesley Clark).

Only thing changing is the proximity of our non-contingent pending plans for Iran...and those require replacing evolutionary science with Divine Intervention crapola data.

Everyone knows how 'good' data sounds and resonates. This is just BS...but I'm sure it will nonetheless prove good enuff for its purpose.

After all, the data doesn't have to stand the test of time - it just has to tide us over a fiscal quarter or two into our attack.

2/09/2006 7:14 AM  
Blogger Effwit said...

Drew L:

Interesting find about the editing of the story in the Dallas paper.

Methinks that the Israel mention is the reason. Being the sometimes overlooked driver of U.S. foreign policy.

They can't imagine that they are protecting the CIA, given all the other details from the article.

2/09/2006 10:14 AM  
Blogger Effwit said...

Meatball One:

Drew from Texas actually made the Dallas discovery. Good on him.

The editing does illuminate the agenda somewhat.

I seriously doubt that Iran will ever be a threat to the U.S., even if they get the bomb. They would know full well their fate if they used (or passed to "terrorists") a nuke.

The promise of retaliatory counterstrikes worked perfectly well against the Soviets.

The neo-cons fear of the freedom-hatin' Muslims is coloring their already questionable judgment.

However, I'm not saying that "security party's" perverted plans won't be put into play at some rapidly approaching point in time.

2/09/2006 10:25 AM  
Blogger M1 said...

Then a hat tip to ol' DrewL

2/09/2006 4:59 PM  

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