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.