Did Spooks Pressure the Administration to Release the Recent NIE?
Theories vary. One goes like this: the intelligence community saw that the administration was spinning up the war(p) drives for an attack on Iran, employing the same strategy of evidence distortion that it used in the lead-up to Iraq. Alarmed that even this out-of-control administration would do such a thing twice, members of said community made it known that if the relevant parts of the NIE were not revealed by the administration, then those parts would be revealed in some other way. Knowing what a debacle it would be to get busted like that, the administration hastily went public.
Now, although this fit with my view of the administration with absolute perfect precision, I still couldn't believe it. Not even these guys are really, actually that corrupt and dishonest.
Shows what I know.
As it turns out, that may very well have been exactly what happened. Former spook Pat Lang writes:
The "jungle telegraph" in Washington is booming with news of the Iran NIE. I am told that the reason the conclusions of the NIE were released is that it was communicated to the White House that "intelligence career seniors were lined up to go to jail if necessary" if the document's gist were not given to the public. Translation? Someone in that group would have gone to the media "on the record" to disclose its contents. [via Drum]
Needless to say, we don't currently have enough evidence to conclude that this is true. But if it is true...well... I've said many times that I'm one of those hyper-fallibilistic liberals who walks around all the time plagued with doubts that he's getting everything wrong. If this turns out to be true, those doubts will be banished. It would be an almost flawless confirmation that my view of these guys is basically right on the money. Such confirmation would be just to perfect, too poignant to ignore. And it would be further confirmation that that's what they did the first time: distorted the evidence in front of them to manipulate us into doing what they intended to do the entire time. If our own spooks have to threaten to go public with intelligence to prevent a rogue administration from lying us into a war, we really are in the twilight zone.
If they really were knowingly, willfully, mendaciously pushing us toward yet another war, then by God it would take absolute disregard for the principles of our republic to hold that impeachment should be "off the table."
Theories vary. One goes like this: the intelligence community saw that the administration was spinning up the war(p) drives for an attack on Iran, employing the same strategy of evidence distortion that it used in the lead-up to Iraq. Alarmed that even this out-of-control administration would do such a thing twice, members of said community made it known that if the relevant parts of the NIE were not revealed by the administration, then those parts would be revealed in some other way. Knowing what a debacle it would be to get busted like that, the administration hastily went public.
Now, although this fit with my view of the administration with absolute perfect precision, I still couldn't believe it. Not even these guys are really, actually that corrupt and dishonest.
Shows what I know.
As it turns out, that may very well have been exactly what happened. Former spook Pat Lang writes:
The "jungle telegraph" in Washington is booming with news of the Iran NIE. I am told that the reason the conclusions of the NIE were released is that it was communicated to the White House that "intelligence career seniors were lined up to go to jail if necessary" if the document's gist were not given to the public. Translation? Someone in that group would have gone to the media "on the record" to disclose its contents. [via Drum]
Needless to say, we don't currently have enough evidence to conclude that this is true. But if it is true...well... I've said many times that I'm one of those hyper-fallibilistic liberals who walks around all the time plagued with doubts that he's getting everything wrong. If this turns out to be true, those doubts will be banished. It would be an almost flawless confirmation that my view of these guys is basically right on the money. Such confirmation would be just to perfect, too poignant to ignore. And it would be further confirmation that that's what they did the first time: distorted the evidence in front of them to manipulate us into doing what they intended to do the entire time. If our own spooks have to threaten to go public with intelligence to prevent a rogue administration from lying us into a war, we really are in the twilight zone.
If they really were knowingly, willfully, mendaciously pushing us toward yet another war, then by God it would take absolute disregard for the principles of our republic to hold that impeachment should be "off the table."
posted by Winston Smith at
9:10 PM
2 Comments:
Fortunately for the Bush administration, unfortunately for everybody else, "absolute disregard for the principles of our republic" is pretty much the entire Democratic Party platform for 2008.
...members of said community made it known that if the relevant parts of the NIE were not revealed by the administration, then those parts would be revealed in some other way. Knowing what a debacle it would be to get busted like that, the administration hastily went public.
I guessed that awhile back, and wrote it here on this blog, keeping up my record of near-perfection and prescience. Career establishment spooks have been leaking for awhile now, contra the administration.
Back in the real world outside of Foggy Bottom, in a quote missing from many press stories, French president Nicolas Sarkozy said yesterday, "Everyone agrees on the fact that what the Iranians are doing has no civilian explanation," referring to Tehran's uranium enrichment work. "The only debate is about whether they will develop a military capacity in one or five years."
Italics mine of course, not the careerists who contributed various components of the NIE.
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