Antiwar.com Blog

In Japan, that is – one of our closest allies, whose discussion of developing nukes was only a response to Kim Jong-Il’s growing arsenal – but, hey, let’s go ahead and chalk this up to Dubya’s refusal to tolerate Saddam’s WMD.

According to former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, writing in the October 9th edition of the American Conservative magazine, the Bush administration is withholding a new CIA National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

“The United States government’s intelligence community has prepared a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, but the White House has decided that it is not “finished” yet and has decided to postpone any decision on issuing it until after the November elections. NIEs are the government’s document of record on international issues that confront the United States and they are supposed to be both impartial and definitive. Vice President Cheney’s office has reportedly objected to many of the conclusions in the draft Iran NIE, or, more to the point, to the lack of any conclusions that he would welcome.

“The draft document indicates that there is no solid intelligence confirming that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, contradicting many recent statements made by the Administration. It also states that Iran exercised virtually no control over Hezbollah in the recent fighting in Lebanon and that there is little to no confirmed information supporting the often cited contention that Iran is arming the militias and insurgents in neighboring Iraq. The report ruefully observes that there are plenty of weapons floating around inside Iraq without any assistance from Iran, though it does note, without hard evidence, that Iran could have provided some bomb making expertise and possibly sophisticated timers and detonators to the insurgency’s arsenal. For what it’s worth, most US intelligence officers working on Iran believe that Tehran is concealing a weapons program even if the hard evidence is lacking.”

The people of the Unitary Executive State of America[.pdf] have a right to know what that NIE says now, before the mid-term elections. Before the next war.

The rest of the piece is regarding Pete “Hoaxter” Hoekstra and Capital Hill staffer Vaughn S. Forrest’s visit with Manucher Ghorbanifar’s sock-puppet, Fereidoun Mahdavi, in Paris, which Larisa Alexandrovna also covered for RawStory earlier this week. Giraldi writes:

“The House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra has been receiving information reports from an Iranian exile source in Paris who is believed to be Fereidoun Mahdavi, a close associate of discredited Iran/Contra fabricator Manucher Ghorbanifar. Hoekstra, who has stated his contempt for the US intelligence community, has been using Vaughn Forest, a well-known Hill staffer who has a reputation for right-wing activism, as a channel to the Ghorbanifar circle. Hoekstra recently made a trip to Paris with Forest to meet the source who has been providing information on Iranian intentions in the nuclear field that CIA and DIA analysts consider to be largely fabricated. Unfortunately, some of these reports have been stove-piped to Vice President Cheney’s office through the Pentagon’s Abe Shulsky, who heads up an “Iranian Directorate”, an office that replicates the disbanded Office of Special Plans that was previously used as a clearinghouse for fabricated and speculative exile reports on Iraq. The Ghorbanifar information is also disseminated to the intelligence community from Hoekstra’s House Intelligence Committee. Ghorbanifar and his associates have no access to genuine information about Iran, often just repackaging media reports and propaganda handouts from the Paris-based Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), a Pentagon protected Iranian exile group that is on the US State Department’s list of terrorist groups. Ghorbanifar and Mahdavi are also reported to be the sources of Pennsylvania Congressman Curt Weldon, who advocates pre-emptive war against Iran. Weldon has written a sensational and factually challenged book on Iran that describes Tehran as the number one threat to world peace, a line that is curiously similar to that being promoted by the Israeli lobby AIPAC.”

At the risk of offending Russians, I feel I really must chime in on the subject of the quite notable suckiness of their country. I’ll just recount current events which have irked me — if I have to mention everything that has bugged me about the behavior of Russia’s government and the brutality of its culture, we’ll be here all day.

Sure, maybe nobody can pin the murder of Anna Politkovskaya on Vladimir Putin — but then he is the president and he was in the KGB in commie days. If anyone could cover up his involvement in a crime it would be Putin. This is all really irrelevant, because this isn’t any kind of isolated incident in Russia — journalists and businessmen are offed routinely in this mafia playpen.

But truly the proof that Russia is at best a thin mockery of a Western culture is the outrageous way Georgian citizens living in Russia have been treated ever since Georgian authorities arrested four Russian spies. Georgian businesses have been shut down, merchants at markets have been swept from their stalls, and even school children who dare to have “Georgian-sounding” surnames are spied on like ethnic criminals — it’s enough to ask if the gulags will really be reconditioned as theme parks after all.

The plain fact is, anyone who didn’t at least try to run screaming from Russia 90 years ago (like many of my relatives did) had to have been some kind of mental defective. Anyone who stays now, well… I think I have risked too much offense as it is.

Matt Yglesias on Marty Peretz‘s new blog:

“Martin Peretz surveys the violence in Iraq, and discerns the cause — the country turns out to be full of Muslims.”

 

As aspiring Georgian dictator Mikheil Saakashvili unleashes a wave of repression aimed at opposition parties, arrests their leaders on trumped-up charges of “spying,” cracks down on the independent media, tortures his political opponents and other prisoners held in Georgia’s disgusting jails, lobbies hopefully for NATO membership, and provokes war with Russia, the “libertarian” Cato Institute sponsors a conference in conjunction with the Heritage Foundation and other pro-Bush thinktanks, on “Freedom, Prosperity, and Peace” in Tbilisi.

That’s a really good sense of timing they have over at Cato: just when freedom, prosperity, and peace are conspicuous by their absence in Georgia!

According to the announcement, “Cato is running this conference in cooperation with Kakha Bendukidze, the state minister for coordination of reforms of the Republic of Georgia.”

While they’re hob-nobbing with the Georgian commissars, the Cato-ites might want to bring up this proposed “reform”: find out who tortured former Georgian government official Sulkhan Molashvili, who was subjected to electro-shock treatment and whose body was burned with cigarettes when he refused to confess to his alleged “crimes.” Shortly before being arrested, Molashvili held a news conference at which he said he had in his possession document’s proving Saakashvili’s links to corruption.

The feds have become super vigilant in tapping our phone calls, tracing our movements, and intruding into our lives over the last 5 years.

Wouldn’t it be great to have hidden microphones around the White House this morning to hear what was said by dignitaries, congressmen, and other sociopaths invited for the signing ceremony of the torture/dictatorship law?

The microphones could capture the gloating  – the  gleeful hand rubbing over the coming suffering of Muslim detainees – the macho strutting about their courage in sanctifying barbarism in the name of freedom.  We would likely hear about how the Republicans plan to hype the signing ceremony in the final weeks of the congressional campaign – the ultimate sign of the GOP’s respect for average voters.

If Bush often sounds insipid and mildly deranged when the television cameras are on him, one can only imagine how inspiring he is off the cuff. And many of the congressmen who championed this bill are as blackhearted as Cheney himself.

On the other hand, Bush and his supporters have made so many false and bloodthirsty comments already regarding torture and other atrocities of the war on terror.  Perhaps nothing Bush could say at this point would wake Americans from their slumber.

Comments on this post and on the signing ceremony are welcome over at my blog here.  Also, if people hear interesting comments by politicians or others on the signing ceremony today,  that would also be most interesting…

UPDATE: The White House posted Bush’s signing statement here.

One highlight: Bush promised, “The passage of time will not dull our memory or sap our nerve.”

Who had the bright idea to have Bush mention “dull” and “sap” in his wrapup?