Pumping up the specter of the bogeyman

As they jockey for position heading into the general election, McCain and Obama are both guilty of overstating any "threat" posed by Iran.

On the campaign trail, both of them are guilty of taking a little bit of known information and blowing it up to ominous proportions. I expect fearmongering and lying from McCain - he's a warmongering old republican fuckhead. But Obama? I have standards where Democrats are concerned, and if he wants to bear the standard for me, and a whole bunch of other people who know what the fuck is going on, he needs to get some fact-checkers on the job and stop asserting facts not in evidence.

What has me pitching this bi-partisan hissy-fit so early on a Tuesday morning, you ask? For starters, it pisses me off to hear people who know better - or should, at least - assert as fact the unsubstantiated allegation that Iran is, without a doubt, developing nuclear weapons.

It gives me pause. Have they even bothered to look at the public record? Or are they both selectively, yet deliberately, dishonest?

Given the Iraq fiasco and the way we were lied into it, I am in no mood to brook any foolishness or abide any willful and deliberate distortion of fact when they turn their sights on Iran.

We all know that where Iran is concerned, every word out of McCain's mouth is distorted, including "and" "the" and "of." His speech to AIPAC yesterday was unwatchable, so palpable was the bloodlust. This does not surprise me.

But when Obama says "Iran is stronger now than when George Bush took office. And the fact that we have not talked to them means that they have been developing nuclear weapons," I call bullshit.

And so does McClatchy.

The 16 agency-strong U.S. intelligence community said last November in an unclassified National Intelligence Estimate that it concluded with "high confidence" that Iran had halted an effort to develop a nuclear weapon in fall 2003.

A senior U.S. intelligence official, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly, said that U.S. intelligence agencies stuck by the NIE's judgment of "moderate confidence" that Iran hadn't reactivated the alleged effort.

There is no evidence that Iran is pursuing the ends that American politicians accuse them of, and Obama plays into the hands of the republican AIPAC fluffers and warmongering chickenhawks when he cedes them even an inch and repeats even watered down versions of their lies.

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Oh, to have been a fly on the wall...

The meeting in London of Foreign Ministers that convened on May 2 has concluded, with the assembled diplomats voting to offer Iran a new package of incentives to increase IAEA transparency and curtail the nuclear program the nation is pursuing. The new offer is an update of the offer originally put forth in 2006 that was rejected by Iran. British Foreign Secretary Davic Miliband declined to disclose details of the package, but said it is aimed at showing Tehran "the benefits of cooperating with the international community."

The biggest diplomatic offer was broad negotiations with the world's major powers, including the first talks with the United States since relations were severed in response to the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

A diplomat in London, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the centerpiece of the new offer is international assistance for a civilian nuclear program and "a reminder to Iran that there is a good offer on the table." One European official said that the new offer adds "a bit" to the 2006 offer but that "there's a limit to how many incentives can be added."

The five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany, have been discussing a strategy that includes both sanctions and incentives to persuade Iran to roll back its nuclear program.

"We very much hope that they will recognize the seriousness and the severity with which we have approached this issue and that they will respond in a timely manner to the suggestions we are making," Miliband said, referring to Iranian officials.

In Washington, French Prime Minister François Fillon said Iran faces global isolation unless it engages with the international community over its nuclear program.

"We have to do everything we could to avoid finding ourselves faced with the only solution of bombing Iran," he said through an interpreter at a news conference, the Reuters news agency reported. "The only option is to pressure the Iranian government through diplomatic means, economic means and financial means."

I would love to have been privy to the talks. I can't imagine that Condi had a pleasant go of it. The rest of the world could care fuck-all about George Bush's legacy, and have no intention of stepping aside and saying "after you, I insist" and holding the door for Mad King George while he ushers in $200.00 per barrel oil. Diplomacy might not mean anything to these imperialistic, neocon goons; but it does to older nations with longer histories that have seen war on their own soil in the last century.

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Religious Conservatives Adopt A Rational Drug Policy

Hallelujah. The conservative, authoritarian, religion-obsessed government has seen the light on drug policy.

It's making cheap condoms and syringes available to addicts, and it's even trying "to change its approach to drug addicts by treating users as 'people who need help' rather than throwing them into already overcrowded jails."

Don't believe it? Smart you. The country in question is not, in fact, our very own America the Addicted and Incarcerated. Will Saletan has the ironic facts:

This morning's news brings a face-slapping AFP story from the land of the mullahs: Iran is setting up vending machines to sell condoms and syringes. The country's drug czar tells its state news service that the machines will be in shelters for addicts: "Condoms, syringes, bandages and plasters will be easily accessible just by inserting a coin. This protects addicts from acquiring AIDS and hepatitis." Cost per item: about 5 cents.

Yes, you read that right: The country that brought you fundamentalist theocracy, Middle East proxy wars, presidential Holocaust denial, an implacable nuclear weapons program, and hundreds of days of Americans held hostage is practically throwing needles and rubbers at junkies.

Why? First, because living under a fundamentalist theocracy evidently doesn't make you any less likely to get hooked on drugs. Iran estimates that some two million of its 71 million people are regular users. We're talking pot, heroin, morphine, and opium. The country consumes some 700 tons of drugs from Afghanistan alone.

Second, because even a fundamentalist theocracy has to deal with reality.

How do you like that? On drugs and HIV, the United States has been out-liberalized and out-pragmatized by the right wing of the Axis of Evil.

No moral equivalence intended, but ... speaking of holocaust denial ...

It's common knowledge - or should be - that most of the two million people incarcerated in the U.S. today are behind bars for non-violent drug offenses.

Here in Kentucky, the budget-slashed Department of Corrections is drawing up plans to release hundreds of such non-violent drug offenders it can no longer afford to feed and house. If only there were a program of rehabilitation, job training and community support waiting for them, instead of a state full of itchy-fingered sheriff's deputies.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

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Ramping up the rhetoric

As the sand slips through the hourglass, the fear that aWol might not get to start another war with Iran is palpable and his rhetoric becomes increasingly shrill and disconnected from reality.

On Wednesday, Bush conducted an interview with the U.S. government run Farsi-language Radio Farda to mark the Iranian New Year. In that interview, Bush asserted that Iran has openly "declared they want a nuclear weapon to destroy people." He also insisted that the Iranian government might be hiding a secret program (in spite of a total lack of evidence to support the allegation.)

There is just one problem - it's pure unadulterated bullshit. A veritable tour de farce.

Iran has never staked any such claim, or even stated on the record a desire for nuclear weapons as a deterrent. The Iranian government has been quite adamant and insisting that the uranium enrichment program that it currently operates in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions is for civilian power plants, not warheads.

Bush repeated his position that Iran has a right to civilian nuclear power, but insists that they should get the low-enrichment fuel from Russian rather than conduct their own refinement, but Tehran has repeatedly rejected that option. "The problem is the (Iranian) government cannot be trusted to enrich uranium because one, they've hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now. Who knows?" said Bush. "Secondly, they've declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people, some in the Middle East. And that is unacceptable to the United States and it's unacceptable to the world." (emphasis added.)

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Iran has denied repeatedly that the country seeks nuclear warheads, and in 2005, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a religious edict forbidding the "production, stockpiling and use of such weapons."

Shortly after the White House released the transcript of the interview on Thursday, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe was on the hotseat and spinning so furiously that he threatened to generate his own gravitational field, dismissing the presidents remarks as "shorthand" for comments allegedly made by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the "World Without Zionism" conference in 2005, where he supposedly, by one translation of his remarks, stated his desire to see Israel "wiped off the map." People who actually speak Farsi have said unequivocally that the comments that this administration is determined to hang their "bomb Iran" policy from are vague and should not be interpreted as a threat to use force against Israel.

As their grip slips, as they lose control of the message, their desperation grows by leaps and bounds. The thoroughly diseased, discredited and debunked Neocon/PNAC political philosophy and agenda rooted in arrogance and hubris that has brought our country to the brink of disaster is increasingly viewed as an uncomfortable embarrassment to the less stupid among the craven fucks who subscribed to it. The few die-hards remaining are the most dangerous of the lot - all that is left are the cornered animals. And the psychotic desperation - and flat-out, pathological delusions - of the worst president ever grow every day. It's time to put impeachment back on the table.

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U.S. arms for Saudi oil?

HERALD SUN CAPTION: Arabian knights: President Bush's car is escorted by riders as he arrives at the guest palace in Riyadh. Picture: AFP

UPDATED BELOW

The Herald Sun in Australia reports an arms deal with Saudi Arabia "to counter Iran's growing military clout." Snip:

Just hours after [Bush's] arrival for the first time in Riyadh, the US Administration said it had notified Congress of its intention to offer the Saudis a controversial package of advanced weaponry as part of a multi-billion-dollar deal with Gulf Arab allies.

Precision-guided bomb kits, or "smart bombs", would give the country's armed forces highly accurate targeting abilities.

[Keep reading... more after the jump.]

But the deal has raised concerns in Israel and among some of its allies about the military balance of power in the region.

The sale appeared to be part of Mr Bush's effort to persuade Saudi Arabia, one of the Arab world's most influential states, to help contain Iran and offset what he has branded a danger to world security.

USAToday headline announces, "Saudis rebuff Bush's call for increases in oil production." Bush had requested that OPEC "increase the supply of oil in hopes of lowering gas prices and avoiding a U.S. recession." What did the Saudis say?

...Saudi Arabia's oil minister said such action would be premature.

"We will raise production when the market justifies it," says Ali Al-Naimi, minister of petroleum and mineral resources for the world's largest oil-producing nation.

Bloomberg News added:

Saudi Arabia has held back about 2 million barrels a day of oil that could be supplied to the market if needed, Naimi said.

And so the horse trading begins. Was the Strait of Hormuz kerfuffle with Iran -- which turned out to be a hoax -- fronted as justification for a U.S.-Saudi arms deal to ultimately cajole more oil out of OPEC? I dunno but all of this smells...greasy.

UPDATE: Via Iran Nuclear Watch:

Yesterday, the Bush administration initiated the formal 30-day notification process for the proposed sale of 900 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) to Saudi Arabia. In response, my colleagues Travis Sharp and Katie Mounts released a report they have been working on for some time arguing that the administration continues to use deadly technologies as the flawed currency of friendship with foreign nations.

The report concludes that instead of working with countries to improve political freedom, the $20 billion sale rewards an oppressive Saudi monarchy whose human rights record has not met expectations of improvement following the accession to the throne of King Abdullah in August 2005.

Report available from the Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation.

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At the end of the day

If only the mainstream press had exhibited the same foresight as Manifesto Joe in reporting the incident with Iran. But, noooooo... they jumped for Bush. Amy Goodman interviewed historian and national security expert Gareth Porter about the Case of the Yapping Lapdogs, the Pentagon, and the Strait of Hormuz.

Speaking of fakery, Faux News' John Gibson kinda implies that Tweety is more sexist than he. What's the difference between a super duper sexist and super shrill misogynist? Tell us in comments.

The election of real Democrats: "Mark Pera goes up against corrupt establishment Democrat Dan Lipinski" in Illinois.

Dday offers more on Pera along with the Maryland match-up between Rep. Al Wynn and challenger Donna Edwards. Go Donna! Plus, another Illinois contest, fighting progressive John Laesch vs. "Rahm Emanuel-backed" Bill Foster.

On the eve of the Michigan primary, Mitt 27%, McCain 22%, and Huck 16%, according to the Detroit Free Press. McClatchy/MSNBC puts Romney at 30%, McCain at 22, and Huck at the bottom of the top three with 17%.

[That's all....No more after the jump.]

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I wonder if George saw a hint of this when he looked into Pootie-Poot's soul?

The Bush administration lost a big one on Monday when Russia announced that it had delivered a shipment of nuclear fuel rods to Iran to be used in a reactor that is to be used for power generation. Russia stressed that the fuel rods are in Iran, but will be under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) , the United Nations agency that monitors nuclear material across the globe.

Back in Washington, aWol nearly strained something as he struggled mightily to construct a sentence and make a comment that wouldn't do any further damage to the fragile relationship the United States currently has with Russia. He managed to not only tamp down his urge to criticize, but also to offer something along the lines of praise...“If the Russians are willing to do that, which I support, then the Iranians do not need to learn how to enrich,” President Bush said Monday. “If the Iranians accept that uranium for a civilian nuclear power plant, then there’s no need for them to learn how to enrich.”

The timing could not have been worse. Just two weeks ago, the intelligence shops released their NIE that revealed that the Iranians stopped their weapons program in 2003. That NIE cut the legs from under aWol and Cheney, and has dampened the call for war with Iran.

Even thought the administration has moved to keep the pressure on the Iranian government, the release of the NIE has served to embolden Iran, and it has made it highly unlikely that China and Russia will be on board for the next round of sanctions by the United Nations Security Council.

The delivery of the fuel rods to the Iranian facility will certainly embolden them further.

As for Bush administration officials, their public comments were one thing, and their private comments were another thing entirely. “There is no doubt that Russia and the rest of the world want to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” was the public comment made by White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe. “And today’s announcement provides one more avenue for the Iranians to make a strategic choice to suspend enrichment.”

In private, however, they lamented the fact that the Russians didn't stall on the delivery, and project an image of a united front that was hanging together and toeing a hard line. “We for many years tried to stop it, and for the last year we’ve known there was no way to stop it, and that it was coming, and we held our breath on the timing,” a senior administration official said.

All that breath-holding was for naught.

Two weeks ago, Russia alerted the Bush administration that the details had been worked out, including the placement of safeguards that would allow for greater international inspections at Bushehr, and that the shipment would proceed.

The U.S. had already agreed, in principle, that Russia could provide the fuel rods, so long as safeguards were in place to handle the spent fuel. With that position clarified, there was no choice for the U.S. to make - the Bush administration had to accept that they had no grounds to keep pressuring Russia to delay the shipment.

So the shipment went forward. Now the question remains - was it purely economics? Or was there a subtle, hidden message? Is this muscle flexing by Russia routine, or something that we should be concerned about?

I'm gonna hazard a guess, and say it's probably the latter.

Heckuva job, there, George. Heckuva job.

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Bipartisanship on the NIE

Who says the Left and Right don't agree?

The NIE finding that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program in 2003 brought two divergent voices together within 48 hours to acknowledge that Bush-Cheney have exaggerated the Iranian threat to scare the bejesus out of people... well, those of us still gullible enough to believe the warmongering.

From the Right, Pat Buchanan (with emphasis):

[Keep reading...]

BLITZER: What do you make of this new intelligence estimate that Iran actually froze or suspended, stopped its nuclear weapons program four years ago?

BUCHANAN: This is a horrendous indictment of the Bush administration, of the Bush intelligence community. The president of the United States and Mr. Cheney have really created almost hysteria in this country where half the country thinks we will have to smash Iran because they're building nuclear weapons. The question, Wolf, is when after 2005 when the intelligence community said that Iran was driving towards nuclear weapons, when did the community come to believe that they had stopped in 2003? Did the president know this when he is talking about a nuclear holocaust and World War III?? If he did, what does that say about the president of the United States? If he didn't, what does that say about the intelligence community?

BLITZER: Sy Hersh was writing about this new estimate a year ago.

BUCHANAN: Certainly then Mr. Negroponte and the head of the CIA certainly have got is to [start] walking into the president and saying, Mr. President, a lot of the community now believes and we're getting more evidence of this that they shut the program down and if they told the president that, how could the president talk about a nuclear holocaust and World War III and have the whole country and half the country believing we have to attack Iran.

Also, Wolf, look at the republican candidates. Many of them have been saying we may have to use tactical atom weapons. Look at Hillary Clinton. She's for that Kyl resolution which authorizes virtually the president to attack Iran. The whole political community in this country looks like it's doing the same thing we did when we went into Iraq without justification.

From the Left, Crooks and Liars, a Countdown special comment from Keith Olbermann... excerpt from the transcript at C&L (with emphasis):

We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole — or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked — at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so — whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency: an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.

After Ms Perino’s announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear now.

In August, the President was told by his hand-picked Major Domo of intelligence, Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what “everybody thought” about Iran might be, in essence, crap.

Yet on October 17th the President said of Iran and its president, Ahmadinejad:

“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon.”

And as he said that, Mr. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.

Or was it, sir, to scare the Americans?

Now that's some bipartisanship!

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Pushback against the NIE on Iran

UPDATED AFTER THE BREAK

Over the past five days, the pushback against the NIE findings would amuse of it weren't such an indictment of our rotting press corpse compounded by the tragic consequences of a rogue presidency, Bushie's neocon sweeties, and the Repub intel committees that let the preznut run amok.

The usual wingnuts -- certifiable Bushwackos who ultimately make million$ reaching millions with erroneous infotainment news and opinion -- have lined up to discredit the NIE, the most unpoliticized and authoritative intelligence assessment on Iran in years. The mission: Protect their precious ideology and the worst president in U.S. history who continues to hype the Iranian threat. Ergo, trash the NIE, Democrats, the IAEA, ElBaradei, Europeans, and Bill Clinton to persuade people their Dear Leader's foreign policy isn't a national security train wreck.

A sampling of this week's propaganda about the NIE:

[Keep reading...]

* Steve Benen's Fox News roundup, a thorough report on Tuesday's contentious talking points from the Bushwacko Right.

* Crooks and Liars alerts us to the alleged CIA plot to subvert the Bush Doctrine authored by the head psychotic of the neocon ward, Norman Podhoretz, also foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani. More in-depth details here.

* ThinkProgess dares to go where I prefer not to tread without galoshes for my keyboard ...further deconstruction of Podhoretz' reaction to the NIE. "He insisted the Iranians were very close to developing a nuclear weapon" and likens negotiating with Iran to the same effect that "Munich had with Hitler." See the TP Update for a creative conspiracy theory: It's a plot to affect the elections! Ooga booga!

* Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson leads us through the twisted minds of neocons gone ballistic.

* Emptywheel reveals John Bolton's warped history, one caveat of which was featured in a Dec. 6 Washington Post editorial, The Flaws In the Iran Report. More pushback on the IC's new sourcing rules used for the NIE. Plus, a nifty NIE timeline so you can keep track of who boosted what and lied when.

* Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation takes The Post's Al Kamen to the woodshed for his "snarky" hit job on the IAEA's Director General Mohamed ElBaradei and his remarks about the NIE. The quote with ouch from Katrina: "Maybe Kamen and his paper should set aside some time to reflect on how dead wrong they were in blasting ElBaradei on his Iraq assessment." Self-awareness dips low at the WaPo's editorial page so mendacity abounds.

* Bolton on CNN without a disclaimer... shameless. How can CNN advertise itself as "the most trusted name in news" and grant air time to an untrustworthy neocon kook? Dec. 4:

BOLTON: Well, I think it's potentially wrong. But I would also say many of the people who wrote this are former State Department employees who, during their career at the State Department, never gave much attention to the threat of the Iranian program. Now they are writing as members of the intelligence community, the same opinions that they have had four and five years ago.

BLITZER: President Bush says he has confidence in this new NIE, and he says they revamped the intelligence community after the blunders involving weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He says there's a whole new community out there and he has total confidence in what the national intelligence director is doing.

BOLTON: Well, I have to say I don't. I think there's a very real risk here that the intelligence community is like generals fighting the last war. They got Iraq wrong and they're overcompensating by understating the potential threat from Iran.

* More Bolton lunacy on Iran. See and hear him live raving at YouTube -- Dec. 4 on O'Reilly's spinathon in defense of Bush's Iranian warmongering despite the NIE -- Dec. 4 on CNN when Bolton slammed the NIE (excerpts above) -- his desire in August to attack Iran within six months -- earlier in June more warmongering against Iran for arming the Taliban (whom Shiite Iran hates) in Afghanistan -- and earlier in May, Bolton "hoped" that Iran would withdraw from the NPT or to expel IAEA inspectors. Bolton either requires medication for his delusions or he's a stone-cold sociopath. Take your pick.

* Tom Friedman's brain gasping like a hooked brook trout flopped from its cranium to lunge at parody -- an Iranian NIE on America -- that implicitly trivialized the American NIE on Iran:

As you’ll recall, in the wake of 9/11, we were extremely concerned that the U.S. would develop a covert program to end its addiction to oil, which would be the greatest threat to Iranian national security. In fact, after Bush’s 2006 State of the Union, in which he decried America’s oil addiction, we had “high confidence” that a comprehensive U.S. clean energy policy would emerge. We were wrong.

Stephen Colbert has absolutely nothing to fear.

* Michael Ledeen of the spin tank, the American Enterprise Institute, christens the NIE, The Great Intelligence Scam, at Pajamas Media. I decline to link to his scurrilous dreck so click here for excerpt and the link.

* Where's the ooey-gooey fudge factor with a wingnut center? NRO always delivers the goodies:

[1] If Iran was working on a nuclear weapons program until 2003, what does this say about U.S. policy in the late Clinton period and European engagement?

[2] Are [Democrats] now to suggest that Republicans have been warmongering over a nonexistent threat for partisan purposes? But to advance that belief is also to concede that Iran, like Libya, likely came to a conjecture (around say early spring 2003?) that it was not wise for regimes to conceal WMD programs, given the unpredictable, but lethal American military reaction.

[3] Two years ago, the [Intelligence Community] — the same IC that claimed to have detailed information about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, that famously missed the boat on al-Qaeda, and that has had at least two spy networks inside Iran rolled up in the past couple of decades — told us it was all but certain that Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons.” [Ed. translation: They were wrong then so they're wrong now.]

[4] What the NIE does not explain — what no one has explained — is why the world’s third-largest exporter of oil and gas needs nuclear power.... ...It’s no secret that careerists at the CIA and State have been less interested in implementing the president’s policies on Iran, Iraq, and North Korea than in sabotaging them at every opportunity. Sources close to the intelligence community question the objectivity of the NIE’s Iran conclusions, and tell us that three principal authors of the report are longtime critics of the administration’s policy who have axes to grind.

[5] The attitude among many people — like say, John Edwards — is that we dodged a bullet with this NIE. But that's only true if this NIE is right. Indeed, as a matter of national security, it seems to me one could make the case that it would be better for the NIE to be wrong the other way. That is to say, if the NIE is wrong, better it be wrong on the side of caution. Which would you rather: An NIE that says Iran isn't pursuing nuclear weapons when it really is? Or, an NIE that says Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons when it really isn't? How you answer that question probably says a lot about how you view foreign policy generally.

The last chewy nugget from Jonah Goldberg seems to justify dishonesty, the kind that led to Operation FUBAR in Iraq. Yes, such distorted morality shrieks loudly about one's foreign policy view.

I'm certain plenty more pushback against the NIE on Iran skips merrily along to a polka beat but I've got to stop delving at this point. My head hurts from propaganda overload.

Can't wait for what Lil' Tim (who's hosting Rudy!) and the roundtables of the Sunday funnies have to say. Serious talk about the success of the Bush Doctrine could upstage the key findings in the NIE. Wanna bet?

Know of other NIE wingnuttery? Leave your picks in Comments. I'll post an update.

UPDATE: Digby (with a h/t to Josh Marshall) noted "the administration was changing its focus from WMD to Iranian influence in Iraq as a justification for the war they insisted must be waged." Summing up, Digby writes (with emphasis):

It seemed obvious to me that the Iran obsessives were working hard to build a case that even if Iran didn't have the bomb, it had declared war on the US by killing our soldiers in Iraq and we had to start bombing them post-haste anyway. Kyl-Lieberman was clearly designed to further that goal, no matter what Clinton and others say about it now.

Their problem seems to be that The Man Called Petraeus's surge has resulted in a decline in violence and urgency about Iraq --- and they couldn't hold back the NIE any longer. (It would have leaked before long with all this warmongering going on.) They finally had to admit that they couldn't get this defective casus bellis off the assembly line.

They knew. A whole bunch of them knew, even that nutcase Ledeen.

Which makes the pushback the empty rhetoric of gnashing teeth.

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Inside the NIE on Iran

Earlier I wrote that the latest NIE reminded me of Saddam's missing WMDs, David Kay's admission -- "we were all wrong" -- and how the Bush-Cheney WH hyped the nuclear threat of Iraq and more recently Iran. I figure when Bush or Cheney say something, it has to be wrong. But:

Thankfully, adults with conscience from 16 agencies dared to contradict the wrong-headed warmongering of the WH with their NIE findings about Iran.

And, once again, the IAEA and its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, were right.

The front page headline of today's Washington Post explained what made the difference in this NIE, Lessons of Iraq Aided Intelligence on Iran. Better late than never. But don't think for one minute the lessons would have helped if Repubs still controlled the congressional intelligence committees, a point I explored in my previous post.

A few grafs from the WaPo's story:

[Keeping reading...]

The starkly different view of Iran's nuclear program that emerged from U.S. spy agencies this week was the product of a surge in clandestine intelligence-gathering in Iran as well as radical changes in the way the intelligence community analyzes information.

Drawing lessons from the intelligence debacle over supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell required agencies to consult more sources and to say to a larger intelligence community audience precisely what they know and how they know it -- and to acknowledge, to a degree previously unheard of, what they do not know....

...The new report upended years of previous assessments by asserting that the Islamic republic halted the weapons side of its nuclear program in 2003. The report, while expressing concern about Iran's rapidly growing civilian nuclear energy program, contradicted assertions by top Bush administration officials and previous intelligence assessments that Iran has been bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.

"The new report brings the U.S. intelligence community in line with what the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] and several European governments were saying years ago," said David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector and president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

In 2005, the CIA formed the Iran Operations Division that "brought analysts and clandestine collectors together to search for hard evidence."

Communications intercepts of Iranian nuclear officials and a stolen Iranian laptop containing diagrams related to the development of a nuclear warhead for missiles both yielded valuable evidence about Iran's nuclear past as well as its decision in 2003 to suspend the weapons side of its program....

...The report also reflects what several officials described yesterday as a new willingness by the intelligence community to analyze intentions in addition to capabilities. While Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity to make nuclear weapons, including knowledge of how to enrich uranium to a level usable in bombs, the new intelligence collected through intercepted communications raised doubts about Iran's intended use of the technology.

The following passage piqued my interest since the Natanz plant in Iran had been mentioned as a potential "bunker-busting" bomb target of U.S. contingency attack plans. As it turns out, DNI offcials demanded...

...a broader array of intelligence sources, including news accounts and other "open sources" that traditionally had carried little weight inside intelligence agencies. In the case of Iran, critical information was gleaned from non-clandestine sources, such as news photographs taken in 2005 depicting the inner workings of one of Iran's uranium enrichment plants, an official said.

Those photos helped persuade analysts that the Natanz plant was suited to making low-enriched uranium for nuclear energy but not the highly enriched uranium needed for bombs.

Go read the article, which covers more details than I've quoted. As always, buckle up and don on your skeptical spectacles when reading inside the Beltway reporting.

For refreshing candor and intel expertise, check Larry Johnson who offers insights into Bush's lie about when he learned Iran had shut down its nuclear program. Johnson also examines the NIE and how the "NIC stepped up and refused to budge despite repeated efforts by Dick Cheney and his minions to gut the effort."

Score one for the home team.

There's more: "Inside the NIE on Iran" >>

First Iraq and now Iran

I'll never forget watching U.S. weapons inspector David Kay testify that his team had found no WMDs in Iraq.

The latest NIE on Iran's lack of nuclear capability reminded me of Kay's poignant admission, "It turns out that we were all wrong." Thankfully, adults with conscience from 16 agencies dared to contradict the wrong-headed warmongering of the WH with their NIE findings about Iran.

And, once again, the IAEA and its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, were right.

Rewind to Aug. 23, 2006, when the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) then chaired by loyal Bushie Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) issued a report, Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States [PDF].

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Responding to the House committee brief, U.N. inspectors denounced portions of the report as "outrageous and dishonest." The Washington Post, Sept. 14, 2006:

Officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements." The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, which issued the report. A copy was hand-delivered to Gregory L. Schulte, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna.

The IAEA openly clashed with the Bush administration on pre-war assessments of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Relations all but collapsed when the agency revealed that the White House had based some allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program on forged documents.

You remember the Niger yellow cake uranium forgeries that led to the 16 words in Bush's 2003 SOTU, right? We still don't know who forged those docs and for what reason... although one can speculate that a nuclear threat would thwart opposition to preemptive military action against Iraq. Sound familiar?

After no such weapons were found in Iraq, the IAEA came under additional criticism for taking a cautious approach on Iran, which the White House says is trying to build nuclear weapons in secret. At one point, the administration orchestrated a campaign to remove the IAEA's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei. It failed, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

Yesterday's letter, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post, was the first time the IAEA has publicly disputed U.S. allegations about its Iran investigation. The agency noted five major errors in the committee's 29-page report, which said Iran's nuclear capabilities are more advanced than either the IAEA or U.S. intelligence has shown.

Among the committee's assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that "incorrect," noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring.

When the congressional report was released last month, Hoekstra said his intent was "to help increase the American public's understanding of Iran as a threat." Spokesman Jamal Ware said yesterday that Hoekstra will respond to the IAEA letter.

Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a committee member, said the report was "clearly not prepared in a manner that we can rely on." He agreed to send it to the full committee for review, but the Republicans decided to make it public before then, he said in an interview.

The report was never voted on or discussed by the full committee. Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the vice chairman, told Democratic colleagues in a private e-mail that the report "took a number of analytical shortcuts that present the Iran threat as more dire -- and the Intelligence Community's assessments as more certain -- than they are."

Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate. Hoekstra's office said the report was reviewed by the office of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.

Negroponte's spokesman, John Callahan, said in a statement that his office "reviewed the report and provided its response to the committee on July 24, '06." He did not say whether it had approved or challenged any of the claims about Iran's capabilities.

"This is like prewar Iraq all over again," said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that's cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors."

The committee report, written by a single Republican staffer with a hard-line position on Iran, chastised the CIA and other agencies for not providing evidence to back assertions that Iran is building nuclear weapons.

What? How dare our intel agencies refuse to fabricate a slam dunk on Iran for the preznut and the veep. They will never get a Presidential Medal of Freedom with that attitude.

It concluded that the lack of intelligence made it impossible to support talks with Tehran. Democrats on the committee saw it as an attempt from within conservative Republican circles to undermine Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has agreed to talk with the Iranians under certain conditions.

The report's author, Fredrick Fleitz, is a onetime CIA officer and special assistant to John R. Bolton, the administration's former point man on Iran at the State Department. Bolton, who is now ambassador to the United Nations, had been highly influential during President Bush's first term in drawing up a tough policy that rejected talks with Tehran.

Among the allegations in Fleitz's Iran report is that ElBaradei removed a senior inspector from the Iran investigation because he raised "concerns about Iranian deception regarding its nuclear program." The agency said the inspector has not been removed.

A suggestion that ElBaradei had an "unstated" policy that prevented inspectors from telling the truth about Iran's program was particularly "outrageous and dishonest," according to the IAEA letter, which was signed by Vilmos Cserveny, the IAEA's director for external affairs and a former Hungarian ambassador.

A copy of the 2006 IAEA letter as a PDF is here.

To describe the 2006 committee report as flawed would be a gross understatement. The trumped-up handiwork of the Administration's neocon handmaidens served to bolster the WH case to use military force against another member of the "axis of evil." Cheney had already boasted about Iran's "fairly robust new nuclear program" on Imus in the Morning just hours before Bush's inaugural in January 2005. And we know how Bushies work -- the WH claims thus, and then magically... Presto! Documents (and media reports) appear to lend credence to their pronouncements. Before Democrats won majority control over congressional committees, Hoekstra in the House and Pat Roberts (R-KS) in the Senate "vetted" intel for WH lies assertions like the strategic threat that Iran posed to U.S. interests.

What's available to remedy the damage done to U.S. foreign affairs and get back on track? Unfortunately, our rotting press corpse has to cooperate. Today, John Bolton appeared as CNN's NIE contrarian spreading his wacky neocon scaremongering throughout the afternoon. Laughing John Bolton out of D.C. and never permitting him access to a government job or official would be a good step, but don't hold your breath against the neocon revolving door. Impeaching Cheney would be a giant leap for mankind, but too many door-stoppers would halt a Senate indictment or trial if H.R. 799 miraculously revived and passed. Michigan and Kansas voters ought to kick servile Hoekstra and coverup Roberts out on their asses in '08 -- a possibility for Roberts; Hoestra, I dunno. Fleitz can flip burgers; he knows how to take orders. Negroponte, now deputy secretary at State, has already been contained via lecondel. And Iran? Bush remains... undaunted by the NIE to put it politely.

Our best remedy is electing a Democratic president who knows how to use diplomacy, sending a positive signal to Tehran in persuading Iranians to relinquish development of nuclear weapons. You don't think Mitt, Rudy, Huck or Fred can do that, do you?

Repubs have proven they know nuthin' about diplomacy. Or conducting war, which Iraq has revealed so miserably. The neocon dream articulated in the Bush Doctrine has shattered American foreign policy -- our goodwill, blood, and treasure spent. When have the neocons been right?

It's a very useful rule of thumb in foreign affairs to simply assume that the neocons are wrong no matter what, because they are always wrong about everything. That is not to say that all conservatives are wrong about everything, and neocons merge with the more traditional hard line hawk faction just often enough that it gets confusing.

I suspect we will hearing a lot more confusing rhetoric about the worth of the NIE. What's clear to me is Bush's and Cheney's bellicosity towards Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program has been, to refrain David Kay, all wrong.

And for goodness sake, when the ElBaradei speaks, dammit, listen! He was right about Iraq and he's right about Iran. Bush, Cheney and their loyal rubber-stamp Repubs... Not so much.

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Spinning the NIE

I swear that our rotting press corpse must be completely incompetent, illiterate, or mainlining payola to have transformed the NIE on Iran's lack of nuclear capability into the opposite of what the intel estimate says. Crooks and Liars posted up a Google search of "bogus and misleading headlines." More about that in a minute. First, check this priceless lame-ass excuse from Hadley that makes the WH look supremely stupid and unabashedly craven:

As Shuster and Maddow point out, the Bush administration has no shame, which is why they had no problem trotting out National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, to float the ridiculous notion that the report wasn’t completed until Tuesday of last week and that President Bush only learned that Iran halted its nuclear program four years ago — the following day.

Uh huh. So while, "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb, Iran" played in the background over the years, Hadley fed a howler to the American public yesterday to cover the wild assertion that Bush didn't know what the intel folks were debating over the summer. As the Washington Post noted in its front page story about the NIE this morning (with emphasis):

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A major U.S. intelligence review has concluded that Iran stopped work on a suspected nuclear weapons program more than four years ago, a stark reversal of previous intelligence assessments that Iran was actively moving toward a bomb.

The new findings, drawn from a consensus National Intelligence Estimate, reflected a surprising shift in the midst of the Bush administration's continuing political and diplomatic campaign to depict Tehran's nuclear development as a grave threat. The report was drafted after an extended internal debate over the reliability of communications intercepts of Iranian conversations this past summer that suggested the program had been suspended.

But Hadley would have us believe that Bush only learned of the "stark reversal" of intel on Iran just last week. OK, maybe things go real s-l-o-w at the WH and/or Bush reads real s-l-o-w. Or, George -- expecting so many dignitaries for his Annapolis bash, celebrating Thanksgiving, attending all the festivities, meetings, and summits of which a preznut must undertake along with summer vacations -- got distracted. Shucks, keeping up with nukes in the world is indeed hard work.

Another possibility: Incurious George decided to treat the NIE as adeptly as he handled the August 2001 PDB, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S" or the Iraq Study Group's recommendations. He ignored it, in denial of anything that didn't fit his own biased agenda. We'll get to learn the scoop today since he's called a press conference. Oh, joy!

As for the misleading stories that headline the opposite of what the NIE says... how did it happen? Spencer Ackerman at The Horse's Mouth captured a screen shot last evening of an AP story that got picked up by numerous news outlets repeating the erroneous, US Officials: Iran Has Nuke Capability. Ackerman rightfully surmised:

These misleading AP headlines aren't free of consequences.... casual readers will come away with an impression of the Iranian nuclear weapons non-program that's exactly the opposite of what the U.S. intelligence community says it is -- or, at the least, they'll be needlessly confused. And when Bush administration hawks or GOP politicians or Joe Lieberman lie about the nuclear threat from the Tehran Islamofascists, they'll be playing to an already-bamboozled audience. Nice work!

This morning I googled the identical headline text (see screen shot above) just as Ackerman and Crooks and Liars did. When I clicked through, the faulty headlines in all 10 instances that I found displayed appropriate headlines representative of the NIE. For example, the WaPo story headline after the click reads, "U.S. Finds That Iran Halted Nuclear Arms Bid in 2003." Ackerman also noted the same was true yesterday.

I know from work experience that GoogleBot spiders online news editions at various times throughout a 24-hour period. The question is, did the errant AP headline -- indicative of a first pass by GoogleBot recording initial online errors, possibly of a first print edition repurposed for the Web -- show up in the wire story in dead-wood newspapers? Check your local newspapers and let us know in Comments. Hopefully, copy editors caught the mistake before the presses rolled. At this posting, the wrong headlines in Google's search remain unchanged.

There's more: "Spinning the NIE" >>

Cheney: against sanctions on Iran before he was for them

H/T Think Progress:

Cheney has 'fessed up that as CEO of Halliburton he opposed sanctions against Iran.

What he leaves out is that he evaded the law to do business with the Iranian government.

The International Emergency Economic Powers Act authorizes the president to block transactions and freeze assets to deal with rogue nations. In 1995, President Clinton signed an executive order barring U.S. investment in Iran’s energy sector. To evade U.S. law, Halliburton set up an offshore subsidiary that engaged in dealings with Iran.

In 1996, Cheney blasted the Clinton administration for being “sanction-happy as a government.” “The problem is that the good Lord didn’t see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments,” Cheney explained of his desire to do business with Iran.

His rationalization now is that it wasn't his responsibility to uphold U.S. law when he was a CEO.

I know. My head hurts, too.

[That's all, folks...]

There's more: "Cheney: against sanctions on Iran before he was for them" >>

Closing in on a hundred dollars a barrel

Wow. We are going to see hundred-dollar per barrel oil. Maybe today, maybe next week, maybe it will take longer. But I would bet a hundred bucks that we will definitely see it by year end. The dollar is simply too weak to manipulate the markets to prevent it. I'm no econ wizard (I don't even balance my own checkbook, I have a banker I went to high school with do that for me) but Bernanke at the Fed is unnerving. Hell, it scares me spitless. The best analogy I can conjure - It's like a counterfeiter has authentic plates & linen paper, and access to a quality press...But I digress, as is my wont...

Light sweet crude traded at $96.24/bbl. on Thursday, the highest price oil has ever realized.

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I've said it before, and I will say it again...we are witnessing a realignment of world economic and political power, it is realigning along an energy axis, and future historians are going to write about the time in which we live as the "Emergence of the Resource Wars."

If we don't get a handle on this stuff, and do so double-time, the future is bleak. If you like the oil wars, you are gonna love the pending water wars.

There is a new reality in town. The countries producing energy are sitting in what is commonly known as "the catbirds seat." But the US? Not so much. The oil-rich countries, like Russia and Iran, are not going to be cowed by Yankee bluster any more. They have oil, and the emerging Asian economies have an insatiable appetite for the sticky black stuff, and the odorless clear stuff - and the ability to pay for it. The desperation of the Bush Administration as the reality about Iran sets in is growing palpable.

The Bush administration is desperate to stop the long-planned India-Pakistan-I ran (IPI) Pipeline, which will deliver Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) to the subcontinent. The U.S. would much prefer that India satisfy their energy needs with nuclear energy via a deal with the United States that has been stalled. Never mind that Indo-Persian relations are over 2000 years old, that Persian was the language of literature and government on the subcontinent until the 1800's. (But these jokers have no use for history, sociology nor anthropology.)

The United States seems bent on clinging to obsolete modes of thinking. It simply makes no sense to invest all of our blood and treasure into securing what's left of a sdwindling resource. Which, by the way, is so chemically unique and versatile, that I am nonplussed that it is simply burned for fuel! Of course, I understand why...it's greed. If you make electric cars that don't burn petrol, every soccer mom in America wouldn't be forking over a hundred bucks a week to Big Oil. It's drug-dealer economics - get 'em addicted and they keep coming back, until they are either dead or desperate enough to go through the pain and agony of cold-turkey withdrawal.

If we were serious about taking concrete steps to counter the coming energy crisis, we wouldn't be fighting a war for oil (and Hubbert, by the way, was an optimist) we would be undertaking a Manhattan Project for energy independence.

Some things are too important to be left to private industry, and responsible energy policy is one of them. Private industry is profit driven. Period. If there is no maximized profit motive, there is no reason to pursue a particular path. It is in the interest of big energy that we remain beholden and dependent upon their products. Thats econ 101.

We should have been working on these problems for the last 30 years, but instead the decision was made to fiddle while Rome burned, the problems could be punted to the next generation. And those of us who were agitating for responsible energy policy were dismissed as cranks, spoil-sports, worry-warts, and Nervous Nellies.

Well, we got the last laugh - except there is no humor in this situation. It's time to deal with reality, because reality is not going to have any qualms about dealing with us.

There's more: "Closing in on a hundred dollars a barrel" >>

Iraq appeals to Iran for help defusing the Kurdish crisis

As tensions ratchet up between Turkey and Iraq over PKK terrorists who find safe haven in Iraq from which to stage cross-border raids and kill Turkish soldiers, and the United States stands by helplessly, unable to even comprehend the scope of the clusterfuck created by the hubris of George Bush, Iraq is reaching out to Iran for help.

That's gonna go over like a pregnant pole vaulter.

On Wednesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki met with Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki and asked him to help present Iraq's positions at a regional summit meeting in Istanbul scheduled for Thursday. “The prime minister asked the Islamic Republic to present their full support to Iraq during the Istanbul meeting and also to participate in solving the border crisis between Turkey and the P.K.K.,” a statement from Mr. Maliki’s office said. The summit will be attended by representatives from countries in the region, including Syria, Iran, Iraq andTurkey. The United States will be represented by Condoleeza Rice, and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and a number of other foreign ministers are also expected to attend.

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P.K.K. terrorists have killed over 35,000 Turks since launching their most recent separatist terror campaign in the 80's. For perspective, consider that in 2 decades, the P.K.K. has killed ten times the number of Turks that America lost on September 11.

Turkey, tired of the terrorists who attack them finding safe haven in Iraq, hiding beneath the petticoats of Turkey's NATO ally the United States in the Kurdish north of Iraq, has massed troops on the border and announced that they will pursue Peshmerga and P.K.K. fighters across the border, engage them and kill them.

Iran has been sympathetic to the Turkish position, because the P.K.K. launches terrorist raids into Iran as well. But the situation is not that simple. Iran and Iraq are both Shi'ite majority countries, and the Iraqi government is Shi'ite majority (al Maliki spent many of his years in exile in Tehran).

From the New York Times:

Iraqi diplomats said they were worried that after the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, met with President Bush on Nov. 5, Turkey may take action against the Kurdish guerrillas, a step that could further antagonize Iraq’s Kurds.

“They are under a lot of pressure from the public, so we think they will do something,” said a senior Iraqi official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter. “We hope they will not.”

Mr. Erdogan has asked the United States to help the Turks take “concrete steps” to reduce the P.K.K. threat.

In Washington, Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon spokesman, confirmed that the United States military was giving “lots of intelligence” to Turkey in its effort to halt the rebel attacks.

As if the situation were not complicated enough, the American forces are still holding five Iranians that were taken into custody in January. Iran says they are diplomats, the United States insists they are members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. “The arresting of Iranian consular officials is a very big strategic mistake,” said Mr. Mottaki. Mr. Mottaki also expressed his displeasure at a comment made by General Petraeus that the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad was a member of the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guard.

And I would like to point out, again, that Petraeus really hasn't done much, if anything, right. Last summer, he managed to piss Maliki off to the point that Maliki threatened to have the General recalled. Generals have to be politicians, that's how they get past the rank of Captain. But this is 4G warfare. They need to be diplomats. And lets differentiate right now: diplomacy and ass kissing are two completely different things. Petraeus has a handle on the latter, there's no doubt. But the former? Not so much.

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This is getting too cozy for comfort...

Let me point out my prejudices right up front.

I am the ultimate cold-war brat. When a teacher asked if anyone knew what the Great Plains were, my hand shot up and I answered "The F-14's!" I was still my Dad's dependent when I married my husband on a Saturday afternoon, and by the end of the following week, we were living atop 18 10-megaton Titan II ICBMs, and would live with those massive killing machines until the last one was pulled out of the ground. The first decade of our marriage, we both did our part to complete the SAC mission and win the Cold War.

The thing is, I never really thought it was "won" in the traditional sense, because George H.W. didn't get together with the top commie and sign a treaty ending it all. Hell, I have always thought the end of the Cold War was less of a sure thing than the Korean armistice. The Soviet Union simply collapsed, but the same people were still running things, they just weren't encumbered by the party any longer, and criminal enterprises - never in danger of extinction in Russia - has flourished. I have never trusted our former adversaries, and thought the administration was beyond stupid to underestimate Putin and the Russian inclination to empire.

So this stuff disturbs me...

Remember that two weeks ago, Putin made a "Nixon goes to China" trip to Tehran, the first Kremlin leader to visit Iran since 1943. That trip took place just days after he snubbed and mocked Condi Rice and Bob Gates when they went to Moscow.

Well, as I type another Russian potentate is in Tehran. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, while in the neighborhood on a visit to Kazakhstan in Central Asia, popped in on Ahmadinejad for tea. A spokesman said the impromptu visit was to discuss Iran's nuclear activities as well as bilateral ties between the two nations.

After the visit by Putin, Iran's former chief nuclear negotiator Ali Laranjani (who resigned last week over differences with Ahmadinejad) said that the Russian leader had delivered a proposal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that represented a new approach to the current nuclear standoff with the Bush administration. Neither the Russians not the Iranians were willing to divulge details of the proposal, but the Iranian side was said to be studying it.

State-run television and news agencies quoted Ayatollah Khamenei at the time as telling Putin, "We will think about what you said and about your proposal," even as he added that Iran was "determined to provide our country's need for nuclear energy."

In the ever-escalating one-upsmanship that the aWol bush maladministration mistakes for foreign policy, unilateral sanctions against Iran were imposed last week in a feeble attempt to punish Iran for their nuclear program, and accusing the Revolutionary Guard of illegally spreading WMDs. Iran seemed to brush off the administrations latest hissy-fit.

Putin reportedly mocked the move, and news agencies quoted him as saying "Why worsen the situation by threatening sanctions and bring it to a dead end?"

In the meantime, I am viewing this new "BFF" status that the Iranians and Russians seem to be with a wary eye. We have been down this path before with the proxy wars between the two superpowers. They facilitated the deaths of 58,000 Americans in Vietnam, and the United States backed the Mujihideen fighters in Afghanistan, who killed approximately 15,000 Red Army soldiers.

I do not believe that the recent muscle-flexing by Russia is just that. I think the messages are quite clear. The world is realigning along an energy axis. Iran and Russia have it, and we need it. But so does China, and they can pay for it with the intrest we pay them on the debt accumulated to finance aWol Bush's vanity war!

Thanks to the arrogance, ignorance, jingoism and hubris of this administration, American influence has been drastically undermined and American interests have been compromised. Perhaps to a point they can't be repaired.

There's more: "This is getting too cozy for comfort..." >>

Administration Continues Its Iran War Roll Out--Cheney Uses Media To Send A Message

The Iran war roll out continues uninterrupted. Last week President Bush talked about World War III, yesterday Vice President Cheney gave a speech announcing that the United States would not allow Iran to obtain a bomb. The AP reported that Cheney told an audience at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies

"Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions. . . .
We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

The New York Times quoted

David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute who moderated a panel discussion before and after Mr. Cheney’s speech, said the vice president also seemed to draw a new red line when, instead of saying it is “not acceptable” for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, he said the world “will not allow” it.

“The first is a condition,” Mr. Makovsky said. “The second is a commitment.”

More after the break.



Caren Bohan of Reuters reported on Cheney's use of the phrase "serious consequences"

Analysts who attended the think-tank forum where Cheney spoke were struck by his tough line toward Iran, especially in light of Bush's recent comments.

"The language on Iran is quite significant," said Dennis Ross, a peace mediator under former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton. "That's very strong words and it does have implications," referring to Cheney's warnings of serious consequences for Iran.

The BBC further reported

Given the nature of Iran's rulers and the trouble it is causing in the Middle East, Mr Cheney said, the US and other nations could not "stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfils its most aggressive ambitions".

"The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences," he added.

"The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message - we will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

There has been an escalation of criticism of Iran by the US administration over the past few weeks, the BBC's Sarah Morris in Washington says.

Last week, President George W Bush warned that a nuclear Iran could lead to another world war.

Mr Cheney's speech comes a day after the resignation of top Iran nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani.

Correspondents say his departure is a sign that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's tougher stance towards the West may be gaining influence within Iran.

You are probably wondering why I included extensive but complimentary quotes from four of the most important news organizations. The quotes are intended to illustrate something interesting. Although they were clearly written by four different writers, the four stories are pretty much interchangeable. Yesterday the AP, Times, Rueters, and BBC were in full stenographer mode. The White House must have been delighted with the coverage. There is very little chance that a foreign observer could misinterpret Cheney's threat.

I have to admit that the AP story does end

The Bush administration's intentions toward Iran have been the subject of debate in Congress.

Last month the Senate approved a resolution urging the State Department to label Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization.

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., said he feared the measure could be interpreted as authorizing a military strike in Iran, calling it Cheney's "fondest pipe dream."

Of course, that ending merely emphasizes that some Democrats think Cheney is obsessed with Iran.

There's more: "Administration Continues Its Iran War Roll Out--Cheney Uses Media To Send A Message" >>

Valerie Plame Wilson Watch

What could ex-CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson -- who was outed as a spy by the traitorous Bush-Cheney cabal -- have to say on the eve of her book release, "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House"?

Maybe details about how she was involved in preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon and the classified mission, Operation Merlin?

Nah, as an honorable, stalwart defender of America's national security and former CIA NOC, she can't say all that much. Too bad the Bush WH doesn't measure up to her standards.

But some of what Valerie would say is this:

PLAME: I can tell you all the intelligence services in the world were running my name through their databases to see did anyone by this name come in the country? When? Do we know anything about it? Where did she stay? Who did she see?

COURIC: And what would be the ramifications of that?

PLAME: Well, it was very serious. It puts in danger, if not shuts down, the operations that I had worked on.

You can hear and watch more tonight when CBS 60 Minutes will air an interview with Valerie (Check your local listings). Preview here. I've already set my timer as I count the days until the arrival of her book pre-ordered at Amazon.

Monday night, Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson will appear on CNN's Larry King's show.

Also of special note on Monday, Sidney Blumenthal will host Valerie at FireDogLake for a special FDL Book Salon... at 10:30am -12:30pm PT/ 1:30-3:30pm ET.

And, of extra, extra special note, a trip down memory lane...

Remember when the Left Blogosphere cried out for the public release of the Libby letters that were written by Scooter's supporters (for example, GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson) appealing to the judge to go easy on sentencing the Cheney aide? Didn't we want to see who defended the convicted felon for his part in the CIA leak case and what they could possibly write about Libby?

Only a couple of liberal bloggers had the guts to go to the mattresses. Hat tip to Blue Girl and...(with emphasis added)

...Bill Moore, a lawyer who contributes to the blog Watching Those We Chose (proctoringcongress.blogspot.com)...

The principle was more important, said Mr. Moore, who personally wrote a brief to the court asking that the letters be made public. “If the powerful in our government are asking for someone to be spared, we ought to know,” he said. “The purpose of the letters is to influence the judge on sentencing, and if there is influence that ought to be transparent.”

Applause, applause!

UPDATE: In acknowledging Blue Girl and bmaz for going to "the mattresses," for taking a stand, writing the legal brief, and coordinating the footwork to get the Libby letters released to the public, I failed to recognize Pale Rider. He delivered the brief to Judge Walton's chambers. Thanks to one and all.

There's more: "Valerie Plame Wilson Watch" >>

Iran News Sunday -- The Beat Goes On

The roll out of the war with Iran continued this last weekend. TPM has assembled an outstanding collage of comments made on several of the Sunday shows. Watch it. It is probably as close to a national debate as the beltway crowd is going to let us have. Actually, it is closer to a real debate than we had going into Iraq, so the media has wised up a little.



A paragraph about the missing Meet The Press is on the other side.



You won't find anything from Meet The Press because, to his credit, Tim Russert spent his full hour talking to Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint about strengthening black families. It was outstanding. A lot of what they said applies to many American families of all races. You probably would better spend your time by following the link and watching the whole show than worrying about Iran.

There's more: "Iran News Sunday -- The Beat Goes On" >>

Hillary Clinton Signs On As Co-Sponsor Of James Webb's Iran War Funding Restrictions

Last week Hillary Clinton joined 75 other senators to pass the Lieberman-Kyl Resolution. Both Joe Biden and Chris Dodd had the good sense not to sign on. Barack Obama was conveniently out of town. Mike Gravel and, more importantly, John Edwards nailed her for her vote at last week's debate. Most importantly, yesterday the New Yorker published a Seymour Hersh article discussed below making it clear that the Lieberman-Kyl Let's Bomb Iran Resolution is nothing less than part of the roll-out of the Vice President's war with Iran. Liberal criticism of Clinton's vote has been loud and long.

Apparently something has sunk in. This afternoon Taylor Marsh broke the story that Hillary is joining James Webb in the reintroduction of his legislation requiring the President to seek explicit authorization before using any funds for military operations against Iran. Of course, Webb's legislation failed to secure cloture last March. It is unlikely it will succeed this time.

TPM's Eric Kleefield asks the following:

So will this amendment pass against a likely Republican filibuster? And either way, will Hillary's signing on as a co-sponsor help to assuage liberal doubts about her positions on the Middle East?

Blue Girl and I exchanged emails discussing what Hillary could do to win the support of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party just this afternoon. Color me skeptical. Simply co-sponsoring the legislation isn't enough. She is going to have to work the bill hard. This is a time for her to demonstrate leadership.

Hillary's press release after the break



October 1, 2007

Washington, DC – Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today announced that she is co-sponsoring legislation introduced by Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) that prohibits the use of funds for military operations against Iran without explicit Congressional authorization (S. 759).

Senator Clinton - who has been at the forefront of calling on President Bush to seek authorization from Congress before taking military action against Iran (Read the Senator's Speech on the Senate Floor from February) – said today, “In February, I took to the Senate floor to warn that President Bush needs Congressional Authorization before attacking Iran. Given recent reports about Administration military planning toward Iran and to ensure that Congress plays a proper role in the authorization of any potential military force, today I have added myself as a co-sponsor of a bill introduced by Senator Jim Webb which prohibits the use of funds for military action in Iran without authorization by Congress.”

Senator Clinton added, “Iran has gained expanded influence in Iraq and the region as a result of the Bush Administration's polices which have also rejected diplomacy as a tool for addressing Iranian ambitions. I continue to support and advocate for a policy of entering into talks with Iran, because robust diplomacy is a prerequisite to achieving our aims. I also support strong economic sanctions against Iran, including designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization, to improve our leverage with the Iranian regime."

“Any military action against Iran will have an immediate impact on our troops serving in Iraq, our allies in the region as well as long term U.S. strategic interests. Senator's Webb's legislation insures that Congress will play its constitutional role of providing proper oversight over the Administration's policy toward Iran. Congressional oversight and debate can help avoid the mistakes and blunders that have afflicted U.S. policy in Iraq. We cannot allow recent history to repeat itself.”

There's more: "Hillary Clinton Signs On As Co-Sponsor Of James Webb's Iran War Funding Restrictions" >>