Anyone remember this headline at the Huffington Post sometime back when that “new” NIE came out on Iran? You know, the one that said Iran wasn’t as much of a threat as BushCo made it appear to be:
Enough Spin Already: Bush and Cheney Lied, Iran Didn’t
Or how about from The Carpetbagger Report:
Let’s not lose sight of the context of this news. The President has, on more than one recent occasion, talked about “World War III” with Iran. The Vice President has been dusting off his 2002 speeches, blustering that the U.S. “cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions.” The man responsible for shaping Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy vision believes anyone opposed to immediate miltary strikes in Iran are guilty of “an irresponsible complacency that I think is comparable to the denial in the early ’30s of the intentions of Hitler.”
But, once again, they’re all wrong.
Tigerhawk has a few more examples:
At the Daily Kos diarists mocked Bush, Cheney, McCain, Romney, and Huckabee for having taken various hawkish positions on the subject. The Booman Tribune claimed vindication, having “spent a lot of electrons over the last year writing to you about a committed and sustained misinformation campaign to suggest that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.” Crooks and Liars wrote that “[i]f it’s possible to make Bush look any stupider—the new NIE report on certainly Iran does.” At the HuffPo, Jon Soltz declared “World War III plans stymied by National Intelligence Estimate.”
And I wrote early on that this was the work of those I call the Shadow Warriors behind the scenes in the Democrat party, a belief that Kenneth Timmerman bolstered:
Its most dramatic conclusion — that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure — is based on a single, unvetted source who provided information to a foreign intelligence service and has not been interviewed directly by the United States.
Newsmax sources in Tehran believe that Washington has fallen for “a deliberate disinformation campaign” cooked up by the Revolutionary Guards, who laundered fake information and fed it to the United States through Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers posing as senior diplomats in Europe.
The National Intelligence Council, which produced the NIE, is chaired by Thomas Fingar, “a State Department intelligence analyst with no known overseas experience who briefly headed the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research,” I wrote in my book “Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender.”
Fingar was a key partner of Senate Democrats in their successful effort to derail the confirmation of John Bolton in the spring of 2005 to become the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations.
As the head of the NIC, Fingar has gone out of his way to fire analysts “who asked the wrong questions,” and who challenged the politically-correct views held by Fingar and his former State Department colleagues, as revealed in “Shadow Warriors.”
In March 2007, Fingar fired his top Cuba and Venezuela analyst, Norman Bailey, after he warned of the growing alliance between Castro and Chavez.
Bailey’s departure from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was applauded by the Cuban government news service Granma, who called Bailey “a patent relic of the Reagan regime.” And Fingar was just one of a coterie of State Department officials brought over to ODNI by the first director, career State Department official John Negroponte.
Collaborating with Fingar on the Iran estimate, released on Monday, were Kenneth Brill, the director of the National Counterproliferation Center, and Vann H. Van Diepen, the National Intelligence officer for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Proliferation.
“Van Diepen was an enormous problem,” a former colleague of his from the State Department told me when I was fact gathering for “Shadow Warriors.”
“He was insubordinate, hated WMD sanctions, and strived not to implement them,” even though it was his specific responsibility at State to do so, the former colleague told me.
Kenneth Brill, also a career foreign service officer, had been the U.S. representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in 2003-2004 before he was forced into retirement.
“Shadow Warrior” reports, “While in Vienna, Brill consistently failed to confront Iran once its clandestine nuclear weapons program was exposed in February 2003, and had to be woken up with the bureaucratic equivalent of a cattle prod to deliver a single speech condemning Iran’s eighteen year history of nuclear cheating.”
Negroponte rehabilitated Brill and brought the man who single-handedly failed to object to Iran’s nuclear weapons program and put him in charge of counter-proliferation efforts for the entire intelligence community.
So why am I bringing up all this old news? Because of this report yesterday:
Little more than a year after U.S. spy agencies concluded that Iran had halted work on a nuclear weapon, the Obama administration has made it clear that it believes there is no question that Tehran is seeking the bomb.
In his news conference this week, President Obama went so far as to describe Iran’s “development of a nuclear weapon” before correcting himself to refer to its “pursuit” of weapons capability.
Obama’s nominee to serve as CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, left little doubt about his view last week when he testified on Capitol Hill. “From all the information I’ve seen” Panetta said, “I think there is no question that they are seeking that capability.”
The language reflects the extent to which senior U.S. officials now discount a National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 2007 that was instrumental in derailing U.S. and European efforts to pressure Iran to shut down its nuclear program.
Isn’t that special. Should we expect any posts from the lefty blogs cited above noting how wrong the NIE was, how wrong THEY were in calling Bush a liar? I’m guessing we will be hearing crickets.
I find it real curious that during the election all we heard from Obama and his cronies was the fact that Bush was wrong on Iran, that he was just warmongering:
…Obama and Biden believe that we have not exhausted our non-military options in confronting this threat; in many ways, we have yet to try them. That’s why Obama stood up to the Bush administration’s warnings of war, just like he stood up to the war in Iraq.
~~~Obama and Biden opposed the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which says we should use our military presence in Iraq to counter the threat from Iran. Obama and Biden believe that it was reckless for Congress to give George Bush any justification to extend the Iraq War or to attack Iran. Obama also introduced a resolution in the Senate declaring that no act of Congress – including Kyl-Lieberman – gives the Bush administration authorization to attack Iran.
Obama supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.
Btw, how’s that no precondition thing working out for ya O’?
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