- It is as though I'm back as an analyst at the CIA, trying
to estimate the chances of an attack on Iran. The putative attacker, though,
happens to be our own president.
-
- It is precisely the kind of work we analysts used to
do. And, while it is still a bit jarring to be turning our analytical tools
on the U.S. leadership, it is by no means entirely new. For, of necessity,
we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been doing
that for almost six years now-ever since 9/11, when "everything changed."
-
- Of necessity? Yes, because, with very few exceptions,
American journalists put their jobs at grave risk if they expose things
like fraudulent wars.
-
- The craft of CIA analysis was designed to be an all-source
operation, meaning that we analysts were responsible-and held accountable-for
assimilating information from all sources and coming to judgments on what
it all meant. We used data of various kinds, from the most sophisticated
technical collection platforms, to spies, to-not least-open media.
-
- Here I must reveal a trade secret and risk puncturing
the mystique of intelligence analysis. Generally speaking, 80 percent of
the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets
or issues is available in open media. It helps to have been trained-as
my contemporaries and I had the good fortune to be trained-by past masters
of the discipline of media analysis, which began in a structured way in
targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone
with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.
-
-
- Reporting From Informants
-
- The above is in no way intended to minimize the value
of intelligence collection by CIA case officers recruiting and running
clandestine agents. For, though small in percentage of the whole nine yards
available to be analyzed, information from such sources can often make
a crucial contribution. Consider, for example, the daring recruitment in
mid-2002 of Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, who was successfully
"turned" into working for the CIA and quickly established his
credibility. Sabri told us there were no weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq.
-
- My former colleagues, perhaps a bit naively, were quite
sure this would come as a welcome relief to President George W. Bush and
his advisers. Instead, they were told that the White House had no further
interest in reporting from Sabri; rather, that the issue was not really
WMD, it was "regime change." (Don't feel embarrassed if you did
not know this; although it is publicly available, our corporate- owned,
war profiteering media has largely suppressed this key story.)
-
- One former colleague, operations officer-par-excellence
Robert Baer, now reports (in this week's Time) that, according to his sources,
the Bush/Cheney administration is winding up for a strike on Iran;"
that the administration's plan to put Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps on the terrorism list points in the direction of such a strike; and
that the delusional "neo-conservative" thinking that still guides
White House policy concludes that such an attack would lead to the fall
of the clerics and the rise of a more friendly Iran.
-
- Hold on, it gets even worse: Baer's sources tell him
that administration officials are thinking "as long as we have bombers
and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran's nuclear facilities."
-
-
- Rove and Snow: Going Wobbly?
-
- Our VIPS colleague Phil Geraldi, writing in The American
Conservative, earlier noted that in the past Karl Rove has served as a
counterweight to Vice President Dick Cheney, and may have tried to put
the brakes on Cheney's death wish to expand the Middle East quagmire to
Iran. And former Pentagon officer, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski,
who worked shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the most devoted neo-cons
just before the attack on Iraq, has put into words (on LewRockwell.com)
speculation several of us have been indulging in with respect to Rove's
departure.
-
- In short, it seems possible that Rove, who is no one's
dummy and would not want to be required to "spin" an unnecessary
war on Iran, may have lost the battle with Cheney over the merits of a
military strike on Iran, and only then decided-or was urged-to spend more
time with his family. As for administration spokesperson Tony Snow, it
seems equally possible that, before deciding he had to leave the White
House to make more money, he concluded that his stomach could not withstand
the challenge of conjuring up yet another Snow job to explain why Bush/Cheney
needed to attack Iran. There is recent precedent for this kind of thing.
-
- We now know that it was because former defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld went wobbly on the Iraq war-as can be seen in his Nov.
6, 2006 memo to the president-that Rumsfeld was canned. (That was the day
BEFORE the election.) In that memo, Rumsfeld called for a "major adjustment"
in war policy. And so, Robert Gates, who had been waiting in the wings,
was called to Crawford, given the test for malleability, hired, and dispatched
by the president immediately to Iraq to weigh in heavily with the most
senior U.S. generals (Abizaid and Casey). They had been saying, quite openly,
Please, please; no more troops; a surge would simply give the Iraqis still
more time and opportunity to diddle us while American troops continue to
die. So much for the president always listening to his senior military
commanders. And the bug of reality was infecting even Rumsfeld.
-
- In his memo to the president, Rumsfeld suggested that
U.S. generals "withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions-cities,
patrolling, etc.," and move troops to Kuwait to serve as a Quick Reaction
Force. Bush, of course, chose to do just the opposite.
-
- Our domesticated press has not yet been able to put two
and two together on this story, so it has been left to investigative reporters
like Robert Parry to do so. In his Aug. 17 essay, "Rumsfeld's Mysterious
Resignation", Parry closes with this:
-
- "The touchy secret about Rumsfeld's departure seems
to have been that Bush didn't want the American people to know that one
of the chief Iraq War architects had turned against the idea of an open-ended
military commitment and that Bush had found himself with no choice
but to oust Rumsfeld for his loss of faith in the neoconservative cause."
-
- Granted, it is speculative that similar factors, this
time with respect to war planning for Iran, were at work in the decisions
on the departure of Rove and Snow. Someone ought to ask them.
-
- Surgical Strikes First?
-
- With the propaganda buildup we have seen so far on Iran,
what seems most likely, at least initially, is an attack on Revolutionary
Guard training facilities inside Iran. That can be done with cruise missiles.
With some twenty targets already identified by anti-Iranian groups, there
are enough assets already in place to do that job. But the "while-we're-at-it"
neo-con logic referred to above may well be applied after, or even in conjunction
with, that kind of limited cruise missile attack.
-
- Cheerleading in the Domesticated Media
-
- Yes, it is happening again.
-
- The lead editorial in yesterday's Washington Post regurgitates
the allegations that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is "supplying
the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq;"
that it is "waging war against the United States and trying to kill
as many American soldiers as possible." Designating Iran a "specially
designated global terrorist" organization, says the Post, "seems
to be the least the United States should be doing, giving the soaring number
of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq."
-
- It's as though Dick Cheney and friends are again writing
the Post's editorials. And not only that: arch neo-con James Woolsey told
Lou Dobbs on Aug. 14 that the US may have no choice but to bomb Iran in
order to halt its nuclear weapons program. As Woolsey puts it, "I'm
afraid within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they
could have the bomb."
-
- Woolsey, self-described "anchor of the Presbyterian
wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs," has long
been out in front plumbing for wars, like Iraq, that he and other neo-cons
myopically see as being in Israel's, as well as America's, interest. On
the evening of 9/11, Woolsey was already raising with Tom Brokaw and Peter
Jennings the notion that Iraq was a leading candidate for state sponsorship
of the attacks. A day later, Woolsey told journalist James Fallows that,
no matter who proved responsible for 9/11, the solution had to include
removing Saddam Hussein because he was so likely to be involved the next
time (sic).
-
- The latest media hype is also rubbish. And Woolsey knows
it. And so do reporters for the Washington Post, who are aware of, but
have been forbidden to tell, a highly interesting story about waiting for
a key National Intelligence Estimate-as if for Godot.
-
- The NIE That Didn't Bark
-
- The latest National Intelligence Estimate regarding if
and when Iran is likely to have the bomb has been ready since February.
It has been sent back four times-no doubt because its conclusions do not
support what Cheney and Woolsey are telling the president and, through
the domesticated press, telling the rest of us as well.
-
- The conclusion of the most recent published NIE (early
2005) was that Iran probably could not acquire a nuclear weapon until "early
to mid-next decade," a formula memorized and restated by Director
of National Intelligence Michael McConnell at his confirmation hearing
in February. One can safely assume that McConnell had been fully briefed
on the first "final draft" of the new estimate, which has now
been in limbo for half a year. And I would wager that the conclusions of
the new estimate resemble those of the NIE of 2005 far too closely to suit
Cheney.
-
- It is a scandal that the congressional oversight committees
have not been briefed on the conclusions of the new estimate, even though
it cannot pass Cheney's smell test. For it is a safe bet it would give
the lie to the claims of Cheney, Woolsey, and other cheerleaders for war
with Iran and provide powerful ammunition to those arguing for a more sensible
approach to Iran.
-
- But Attacking Iran Would Be Crazy
-
- Despite the administration's war-like record, many Americans
may still cling to the belief that attacking Iran won't happen because
it would be crazy; that Bush is a lame-duck president who wouldn't dare
undertake yet another reckless adventure when the last one went so badly.
-
- But rationality and common sense have not exactly been
the strong suit of this administration. Bush has placed himself in a neoconservative
bubble that operates with its own false sense of reality. Worse still:
as psychiatrist Justin Frank pointed out in the July 27 VIPS memo "Dangers
of a Cornered Bush," updating his book, <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060736712/counterpunchmaga>Bush
on the Couch:"
-
- "We are left with a president who cannot actually
govern, because he is incapable of reasoned thought in coping with events
outside his control, like those in the Middle East.
-
- "This makes it a monumental challenge-as urgent
as it is difficult-not only to get him to stop the carnage in the Middle
East, but also to prevent him from undertaking a new, perhaps even more
disastrous adventure-like going to war with Iran, in order to embellish
the image he so proudly created for himself after 9/11 as the commander
in chief of 'the first war of the 21st century.'"
-
- Scary.
-
- Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990 and
Robert Gates' branch chief in the early 1970s. McGovern now serves on the
Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
He is a contributor to <http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html>Imperial
Crusades, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He can be
reached at: <mailto:rrmcgovern@aol.com>rrmcgovern@aol.com
|
