President Bush rejected Tuesday any suggestions of a change in U.S. policy toward Iran, despite the release the previous day of a long-awaited U.S. intelligence report that concluded Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
Bush denied that the new national intelligence estimate -- the collective judgment of the nation's 16 intelligence agencies -- had undercut his administration's repeated assertions that Iran was building nuclear weapons. The report said Tehran's determination to develop nuclear weapons "is less ... than we have been judging."
“I have said Iran is dangerous,” a grim-faced Bush insisted to reporters at his first White House press conference in nearly seven weeks. "The NIE doesn’t do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world — quite the contrary. Iran was dangerous. Iran is dangerous. And Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."
The president vowed that the U.S. would continue to work to "isolate" Iran and asserting the NIE was, in spite of its conclusions, a "warning signal" to the international community.
Report a Clear Embarrassment to Bush -- And Cheney
Clearly, however, the report's finding that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago was an embarrassment to Bush -- and a humiliating defeat for Vice President Dick Cheney, who had put unrelenting pressure on the intelligence community for months to make the document more supportive of his view on Iran that critics charge are aimed at justifying U.S. military action against Tehran.
As recently as October, Bush was invoking the threat of a third world war if Iran was not prevented from obtaining the necessary knowledge to make a nuclear weapon.
On November 12, The 'Skeeter Bites Report published a story by the Inter-Press Service's Gareth Porter that broke the news that Cheney's pressure on the intelligence analysts who wrote the NIE on Iran had held up its release for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear program.
But now it turns out that those "dissenting judgments" actually reflected the majority opinion of the intelligence community -- which refused to knuckle under to the vice president. Cheney was noticeably tight-lipped Tuesday, declining all media requests for comment about the final report.
The vice president had been sounding increasingly bellicose in his public comments on Iran in recent months. In a speech in October, Cheney warned that if Iran “stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences.”
Bush Claims He Learned of NIE Last Week -- But White House Sat On It for 14 Months
Asked if he had been "hyping" the threat from Iran, the president asserted that he was only made aware of the NIE last week and insisted it had changed nothing. "I still feel strongly that Iran is a danger. I think the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace. My opinion hasn't changed."
But Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi told the IPS's Porter that the White House had known about the Iran NIE as far back as October 2006 -- and that it pressured intelligence analysts into reviewing and rewriting their findings three times since then.
"The White House wanted a document that it could use as evidence for its Iran policy," said Giraldi. Despite pressures on the analysts to change their dissenting conclusions, however, they refused to go along with White House conclusions they believed were not supported by the evidence.
Giraldi said Cheney's office had objected to the analysts' findings on both the Iranian nuclear program and Iran's role in Iraq. The 2006 draft NIE did not conclude that there was confirming evidence that Iran was arming Shi'ite insurgents in Iraq.
I'm a native of New York City who's called the Green Mountain state of Vermont home since the summer of 1994. A former freelance journalist, I'm a fiercely independent freethinker who's highly skeptical of authority figures -- especially when they're on the wrong side of the issues I care about. But I'm not afraid to also call into question those with whom I would usually be "on the same page" if and when they, too, are on the wrong side of the issues I care about.
Lets not lose sight. Islamic Fascism declared war against the U.S. and all non-Islamic nations. The truth is the truth. Further, deception is a tenet of their religion to non-believers. Why would any free human want to suppress this?
by
DrColes (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 23 comments)
on Wednesday, December 5, 2007 at 11:53:21 AM
1 comments
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