CNN a Casualty of Iran NIE

Quite tragic.

CNN was ready to help lead the march to attack Iran with its special “We Were Warned – Iran Goes Nuclear.” The two-hour show was to air December 12.

Rather than deal with facts, the show was set in a future where Iran has become a nuclear threat. That special was “based on a different set of rules and a different set of conditions,” said CNN veep-senior exec producer Mark Nelson, noting that the surprising NIE report “changed everything.” In its place, CNN will this weekend air two Campbell Brown-hosted specials on the Iran situation and its history. Portions of “We Were Warned” correspondent Frank Sesno’s original reporting will be incorporated into those hours, which air Saturday and Sunday.

I am sure CNN will recover and find some other way to help start a war.

Cato Institute VP Sneers At Ron Paul: He’s Not Our ‘Kind of Person’!

A recent short piece in The Nation, “Ron Paul’s Roots,” by Christopher Hayes, has this eye-popping denunciation of Rep. Paul by the unbearably pompous Brink Lindsey, a Cato Institute “scholar” and recently appointed vice president for research,

“He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person that’s tapping into those elements of American public opinion that might lead towards a sustainable move in the libertarian direction.”

Here’s a new logical fallacy: the argument from snobbery. He isn’t our “kind of person.” What kind of person might that be? Well, it’s not at all clear. What is clear, however, is who isn’t “our kind of person.” As Senor Lindsey puts it:

“You have this weird group of people. You’ve got libertarians, you’ve got antiwar types and you’ve got nationalists and xenophobes. I’m not sure that is leading anywhere. I think he’s a sui generis type of guy who’s cobbling together some irreconcilable constituencies, many of which are backward-looking rather than forward-looking.”

Oh, those backwoods anti-IRS hicks, with necks redder than the reddest state, hopeless Neanderthals who would never read Lindsey’s book, The Age of Abundance, wherein he describes the supposedly “libertarian” utopia being ushered in by “the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a ‘creative class’ of ‘knowledge workers.'”

Lindsey and his fellow creative geniuses are too good for the poor untutored hoi polloi who don’t go to the gym four days a week and are neither feminists nor gay. In Lindsey’s lexicon, “Forward-looking” means “people like me,” and “backward-looking” stands for non-feminist non-gay non-gym-going proles, who don’t count anyway.

In any case, sneers Lindsey, Paul “comes from a different part of the libertarian universe than I do.” Yes, it’s all about him and his exotic prejudices.

I had to laugh when I read how Hayes demarcates the pro-Paul “populist” libertarians from the anti-Paul crowd — the latter are deemed the “cosmopolitan” faction! Yeah, as in Cosmopolitan magazine.

Lindsey’s haughtiness is really a joke, especially when it’s married to his clueless political analysis: who are these “xenophobes” he talks about — the overwhelming majority of Americans who don’t support his own “open the borders” position? And as for these alleged “nationalists” flocking to the Paulian cause: I guess this means they’re attracted to Ron’s questioning of why we’re going to war on account of UN resolutions and entangling alliances. Otherwise, I can’t imagine a less nationalistic candidate, in the modern sense of aggressive expansionism — which surely is better suited to Lindsey’s own position in favor of the Iraq war and the “liberation” of the Middle East.

What the Nation doesn’t tell us, however, is what might really interest Nation readers: that Lindsey’s critique of Paul is really rooted in Lindsey’s pro-war position. He argued in favor of the Iraq war in a piece for Reason magazine, basically making the neocon “weapons of mass destruction-they’ll-greet-us-as-liberators” argument, while Paul, of course, was against the war from the beginning. Having abandoned the core libertarian stance — opposition to mass murder by the State — Lindsey and his ilk are on their way out of libertarianism, as I’ve explained elsewhere, while Paul and his “backward-looking” brethren represent the future of the movement.

The hostility of the Beltway faux-libertarians to the Paul campaign is no surprise, as I explained here, but I’m glad to see the Reason folks are coming around. As the Hayes piece puts it: “Nothing breeds harmony like success, and the Paul bandwagon is now getting big enough for both the Hatfields and the McCoys to get on board. ‘Our readership is very enthusiastic,’ says Nick Gillespie, editor of the DC-based magazine Reason. A few months ago Reason published an article titled ‘Is He Good for the Libertarians?’ That no longer seems an open question.”

Hayes has got that right. Unfortunately, he gets other matters quite wrong: for example, I haven’t seen a single “Confederate nostalgist” at a Ron Paul event, and I’ve been to a few. I don’t imagine there are very many of these in New Hampshire, at any rate, where Ron is up to 8 percent. Hayes also brings out the “white supremacist” canard, based on the unsolicited “support” of someone who served with Dubya’s shock troops in Florida during the recount — a coincidence that seems just a bit dicey, if you think about it for a moment.

Hayes doesn’t want us to know that the key issue between the tiny Lindsey faction and the really existing libertarian movement is the war, and the issue of our foreign policy of global aggression. Just like he doesn’t want us to know the difference between Paul and all the Democratic presidential aspirants but Kucinich — which is the former’s unequivocal opposition to the war and his call for the immediate withdrawal of all US troops. If Paul runs as a third party antiwar candidate, and Hillary gets the Democratic nod, good luck to The Nation in walling off its leftist audience from Ron’s appeal. That some alleged “libertarians,” who are furthermore associated with the leading libertarian think tank, are helping to smear Ron and allowing themselves to be used in his way, is beneath contempt.

Robert Stinnett

Treason at Pearl Harbor

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_12_07_stinnett.mp3]

Robert B. Stinnett, World War II Pacific US Navy veteran and author of Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, discusses the treason of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in approving a policy to force Japan into striking first and deliberately allowing their navy to strike ours at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

MP3 here. (43:10)

Bonus: Charles Goyette’s Interview of Stinnett from last December 7th. (14:55)

Robert B. Stinnett is a Media Fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California, and author of George Bush: The War Years and Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor. See the Independent Institute’s Pearl Harbor resources page here.

Trita Parsi

New Equation in the Gulf

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/charles/aw20071207tritaparsi.mp3]

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian-American Council and author of Treacherous Alliance, discusses the possibility that the new Iran NIE will give the Israeli government the opportunity to adopt a new foreign policy toward Iran, how the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon have benefited Iran and the Iranian leadership’s sanity.

MP3 here.

Trita Parsi is the author of the forthcoming Treacherous Triangle: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007.) He wrote his Doctoral thesis on Israeli-Iranian relations under Professor Francis Fukuyama (and Drs. Zbigniew Brzezinski, R. K. Ramazani, Jakub Grygiel, Charles Doran) at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in 2006.

Dr. Parsi is one of the few people in the US – if not the only one – that has traveled both to Iran and Israel and interviewed top officials in these countries on the state of Israeli-Iranian relations. He has conducted more than 130 interviews with senior Israeli, Iranian and American officials in all three countries. He is fluent in Persian/Farsi.He has followed Middle East politics for more than a decade, both through work in the field, and through extensive experience on Capitol Hill and the United Nations. Dr. Parsi’s articles on Middle East affairs have been published in the Financial Times, Jane’s Intelligence Review, the Globalist, the Jerusalem Post, the Forward, BitterLemons and the Daily Star.

He is a frequent commentator on US-Iranian relations and Middle Eastern affairs, and has appeared on BBC World News, PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN (Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room, Anderson Cooper 360°), CNN International (Your World Today), Al Jazeera, C-Span, NPR, MSNBC, Voice of America and British Channel 4.

Wayne Barrett

Giuliani’s Ties to KSM and Osama’s Friend

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_12_06_barrett.mp3]

Village Voice senior editor Wayne Barrett discusses Rudolph Guliani’s business dealings with the Interior Ministry of Qatar, whose chief, Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani, helped 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohamed escape the clutches of the FBI in 1996, Rudy’s company’s helping to provide security for the leaders of Iran, Syria and Hamas while they were in Qatar during the Asian Games last year and the role of al Qaeda and al-Thani in the Khobar Towers attack of 1996.

MP3 here. (27:18)

Wayne Barrett, senior editor at the Village Voice and teacher at the Journalism School at Columbia University. In addition to covering city and state government and politics at the Voice for 28 years, Barrett has written three books: City for Sale; Trump: the Deals and the Downfall; and Rudy! An Investigative Biography and Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11.

Scott Ritter

Cheney’s Iran Policy Still Stands

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_12_06_ritter.mp3]

Scott Ritter, former U.S. Marine and UN weapons inspector and author of Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change, discusses the new Iran NIE, its confirmation of his long-held contention that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, the lack of hard evidence that they ever did, the illogic of the administration’s demands that Iraq and now Iran prove a negative, the mysterious origin of the “smoking laptop,” his patriotism, the state of Iran’s compliance with the IAEA, the possibility that the timing of the NIE’s release was a preemptive action against Mohamed ElBaradei’s upcoming report on the last outstanding questions, the lies claiming Iran is backing enemies of the U.S. in Iraq, the necessity of withdrawal, his case that the total debacle of the Iraqi occupation is the result of abject incompetence, the danger to U.S. troops in Iraq in the event of war with Iran, his admiration for Ron Paul and the need of the American people to destroy the careers of their warmonger representatives.

MP3 here. (43:47)

As a chief weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq, Scott Ritter was labeled a hero by some, a maverick by others, and a spy by the Iraqi government. In charge of searching out weapons of mass destruction within Iraq, Ritter was on the front lines of the ongoing battle against arms proliferation. His experience in Iraq served as the basis for his book Endgame, which explored the shortcomings of American foreign policy in the Persian Gulf region and alternative approaches to handling the Iraqi crisis, and for Iraq Confidential, which detailed his seven year experience as a weapons inspector.

Scott Ritter has had an extensive and distinguished career in government service. He is an intelligence specialist with a 12-year career in the U.S. Marine Corps including assignments in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. Rising to the rank of Major, Ritter spent several months of the Gulf War serving under General Norman Schwarzkopf with US Central Command headquarters in Saudi Arabia, where he played an instrumental role in formulating and implementing combat operations targeting Iraqi mobile missile launchers which threatened Israel.

In 1991, Ritter joined the United Nations weapons inspections team, or UNSCOM. He participated in 34 inspection missions, 14 of them as chief inspector. Ritter resigned from UNSCOM in August 1998, citing US interference in the work of the inspections.

He is the author of many books, including “Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein” and most recently “Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change.” He lives in New York State. Ritter was born in Florida, and raised all over the world in a career military family. He is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, with a B.A. in Soviet History.