Bush's Nuclear-Boogeyman Scam

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By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers (about the author) Page 2 of 3 page(s)

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Bush's first, laughable response to press questions about the NIE release last week was to claim that he was informed in August of 2007 by National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell that there was unspecified "new information" on Iran, but McConnell "didn't tell me what the information was." We were supposed to believe that Bush never asked "what information?", but simply went back to bike-riding in the White House gym. That was the Maximum Leader's cockamamie story, which didn't pass the smell test by any measure.

Senator Joe Biden, among many others, expressed incredulity and outrage at this obvious lie. Said the Delaware senator: "Are you telling me a president that's briefed every single morning, who's fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the U.S. government [was that the Iranians] had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in '03? I refuse to believe that. If that's true, he has the most incompetent staff in modern American history, and he's one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history."

Without admitting that Bush had lied, the White House hastily "amended" Bush's comment; Press Secretary Dana Perino, ( http://thinkprogress.org/2007/12/06/perino-lie-bush ) admitted that MConnell told Bush that Iran's nuclear program may have been "suspended." With a straight face, she went on: "I can see where you could see that the president could have been more precise in that language. But the president was being truthful."

THE NEW OPERABLE WORD: "KNOWLEDGE"

How can we be sure that Bush was informed of the actual Iran findings by the intelligence community? Because it was in August that Bush's anti-Iran rhetoric switched. Instead of talking about a nuclear-weapons program and capabilities, he began referring to how dangerous Iran would be if it obtained the "knowledge" of how to make nuclear weapons. A BIG difference.

It took some weeks but a number of internet political analysts (most notably Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo) ( http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/060217.php ) began commenting on the ramifications of that difference. In October, for example, I wrote: "The former probable casus belli- -- coming close to having a nuclear weapon -- has now been replaced by having 'knowledge' of how to build a bomb. Anyone can obtain that 'knowledge' on the internet or by reading scientific papers. Short version: the U.S. will attack." ( www.crisispapers.org/essays7w/dime.htm )

But few in the mainstream media either noticed or commented on the difference, since the anti-Iran propaganda emanating from Cheney and Bush and Rice was rolled out daily, as a justification for when the U.S. would be "forced" to go to war with Iran, presumably in the Spring of 2008. In other words, even though CheneyBush knew about the NIE findings, they continued to issue statements that were designed to give the impression that nothing had changed and that Iran's nuclear-weapons program was on track and was scarily close to being operational -- Bush even used the term "World War III". (For a great chronological summary of how this all unfolded, see the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin's "A Pattern of Deception.") (- www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/12/05/BL2007120501703_5.html )

As the Bush Administration moved closer and closer to pulling the trigger on an Iran attack, something had to be done by those forces inside the government who opposed the Iran misadventure. Hence, the forcing of the release of the NIE.

SY HERSH'S 2006 REPORTING

We now know that Cheney and his neo-con forces inside the Administration had prevented the NIE from surfacing for a long time. Pulitizer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that Cheney had "kept his foot on the neck of that report" for more than a year.

Much of the early history of this attack-Iran plan was reported brilliantly by Hersh in The New Yorker. Here are the money quotes from a Raw Story summary: ( http://rawstory.com/news/2007/CNN_Seymour_Hersh_vindicated_by_new_1205.html )

>> "As early as July 2006, Hersh had reported that the US military was resisting administration pressure for a bombing campaign in Iran, because 'American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities.'

>> "By November 2006, Hersh's sources had told him of 'a highly classified draft assessment by the C.I.A.,' which concluded that satellite monitoring and sophisticated radiation-detection devices planted near Iranian facilities had turned up absolutely no evidence of a nuclear weapons program. However, Bush and Cheney were expected to try to keep those conclusions out of the forthcoming NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities.

>> "As Hersh explained to Wolf Blitzer at the time, the White House was attempting to counter the CIA assessment with an Israeli claim, based on a 'reliable agent,' that Iran was working on a trigger for a nuclear device. 'The CIA isn't getting a good look at the Israeli intelligence.' Hersh explained: 'It's the old word, stovepiping. It's the President and the Vice President, it's pretty much being kept in the White House'."

And kept it was, under Cheney's heel, until last week, when the White House released the NIE, presumably because they feared the New York Times was about to run the story, maybe one leaked by those angry CIA analysts.

The White House took an embarrassing P.R. hit with the release of the NIE, since their rationale for an imminent military attack on Iran went out the window, but, in true Rovian fashion, Bush and Cheney and Hadley and their neo-con echo chamber in the rightwing media proceeded as if the NIE never had been issued and continued to urge the world to come down hard on the secretive Iranians for not "coming clean" about their nuclear program. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

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Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (more...)

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