Revolution #59, September 3, 2006
WMD Lies All Over Again
Bush's National Intelligence Agency (NIA) Director is a man named John Negroponte. Negroponte orchestrated the Contra campaign of terror against the Sandanista government in Nicaragua. He was U.S. ambassador to the UN during the buildup to the Iraq war, and sat next to Colin Powell on Feb. 5, 2003, when he lied to the UN about Iraq’s non-existent WMDs.
But Negroponte's NIA has not been producing lies about Iran fast enough for the Bush Regime. In an interview with NBC News, he said “[T]he prospects of an Iranian [nuclear] weapon are still a number of years off, and probably into the next decade.” (April 20).
Wrong answer! Powerful forces in congress have demanded Negroponte produce a different story, or else. Neocon columnist Frank J. Gaffney Jr. has called for Negroponte's firing for not producing a different story on Iran, and for hiring analysts who were skeptics about Bush's Iraqi WMD claims.
This week, Congressional Republicans demanded that intelligence agencies produce a story to justify war on Iran. Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who helped lead the prosecution of the Bush administration for war crimes in the Iraq War at the Bush Crimes Commission (bushcommission.org), writes:
Now suddenly appears a pseudo-estimate titled “Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States.” To wit, the challenge set before the Intelligence Community is to get religion, climb aboard, and “recognize” Iran as a strategic threat. But alas, the community has not yet been fully purged of recalcitrant intelligence analysts who reject a “faith-based” approach to intelligence and hang back from the altar call to revealed truth. Hence, the statutory intelligence agencies cannot be counted on to come to politically correct conclusions regarding the strategic threat from Iran. [truthout.org].
Recycling the nonexistent Iraq-Al Qaida connection, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich concocted a story about North Korea—which is estimated to have as many as two deliverable nuclear weapons—sending nuclear weapons to Iran. On Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, he said, “I think people should be very worried that all these reassurances about how long we have until Iran gets a nuclear weapon could be totally false if tomorrow morning, the North Koreans sold them one and flew it into Iran.”
And all this goes along with continuing stories on Fox News to program their viewers to believe that not only were non-existent WMDs “found” in Iraq, but they ended up in Hezbollah's hands in Lebanon!
Critical thinking readers can recognize that these pretexts are absurd. But critical thinkers must also confronted the fact that that a) these lies are being force fed to the populace, and b) absurd or not, a “reality” is being constructed out of lies—in a way bizarrely similar to the build-up to the war on Iraq—to prepare conditions for an attack on Iran.
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