Red State Renegade

Speaking of ‘Crazies’ seeking war…(see previous post, below this one)

The above is an actual headline on the ABC news website.

The third paragraph, however, shows (to anyone with at least the mental capacity of Terri Schiavo) the whole premise to be questionable (or, at least nothing new):

“Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stopped short earlier this week of blaming Iran, saying the U.S. did not have evidence ‘of the involvement of the Iranian government in support of the Taliban.’”

Well… would that not put the “red-handed” claim to bed for the moment?

Apparently not. The article goes on to make a number of dubious statements, almost all attributed to “a senior coalition official” (not named, of course):

“Clear evidence of Iran’s involvement…”

“Part of a considered policy…”

“Clear indications that [munitions recovered in two Iranian convoys] originated in Iran…”

“Iran has provided (lethal EFPs, or explosive formed projectiles, the roadside bombs) to Iraqi insurgents with deadly results…”

“These clearly have the hallmarks of the Iranian Revolution Guards”

The only other comments are from some closet neo-con wingnut at the Rand Institute who seems to make a living writing about the projection of American power abroad.

Wow. after all the flak about Iraq I would expect the lapdogs to be a little subtler this time around.

But the ‘hopeful’ part is in the comments ABC received. Maybe the party’s over for this kind of reporting?

Almost all the comments I read attacked the sensational headline and lack of real sources:

“Please don’t become part of the new neo con push for a new war in Iran. Check and double check your sources. We had far too much of the media serving as the mouthpiece for this administration leading up to the Iraq war. We don’t need another media encouraged disaster.”

“As soon as I see this reported by a reputable source that is not a member of the United States corporate media, I’ll start believing it. ABC News, like the rest of the American media, helped the Bush Administration lie us into the quagmire in Iraq. The RAND Corporation, who they quote so freely, is run by people who stand to make BILLIONS off of the next war that we are lied into. Let me hear this from someone who doesn’t stand to make a profit off of the next military misadventure.”

“If the report has evidence that the Iranian government is behind it, then, sure, make that headline, but hiding behind “Report says” and analysis of unnamed official without evidence should no longer be acceptable reporting in this country…Not after similar reporting contributed to the war in Iraq.”

“Read the article three or four times. You will see that both sources are SPECULATING that the Iranian government is inolved. COMPLETELY SPECULATING. So why does ABCNEWS say Iran was caught ‘red handed’? Why is this disinformation being used on the American public? For what purpose are we being lied to? Why are the powers that be trying so hard to get another diastrous war started?”

Write to ABC news. Let ‘em know how shameless they are, or go to the article above and post a comment (It takes 5 seconds).

UPDATE (6/7/07) - NATO Force General debunks claims:

Another news article out today centers on a direct rebuttal from U.S. Army General Dan McNeill, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force. Interesting, as the ABC news site specifically attributed the ‘red-handed’ discovery to NATO:

Although he confirmed that NATO did intercept two convoys of weapons, he said there is no clear evidence that Iran is supplying the Taliban with weapons, and that it is common in Afghanistan to encounter weapons that originate in other countries.

General McNeill mentions the finding of mortar rounds of Iranian origin in one convoy, as well as explosives similar to the U.S.-made C-4 in the other.

“Beyond that, there’s not much significant to report on these two convoys,” he said.

YIKES…How do these people live with themselves now?

As far as I am concerned, it’s been well proven from many angles that the Iraq war was a wet dream of the Boy King, who was set on attacking Iraq and simply needed to find a way to justify it.

The icing on the cake was the Downing Street documents, a series of memos prepared in 2002 by the British Intelligence service in which they admit that the claim that Iraq had links with al Qaeda was ‘frankly unconvincing,’ but since George was determined to invade Iraq, ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’

Old news. Yet the evidence continues to come out.

A very important, yet little-noted book appeared on the scene about a month ago, keying on the intelligence leading up to the ‘Yellowcake Uranium’ claims in the State of the Union speech that were later debunked - the same claims that led to the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA Agent.

The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq covers Alan Foley, who, as the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), was a front-and-center cheerleader for the Iraq war.

WINPAC led the CIA’s analysis of Iraq’s purported WMD, so Foley himself was at the center of the effort to drum up support for the dubious war.

The book, written by award winning authors Peter Eiser and Knut Royce, reports:

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center’s analysts: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

Other books back up this assertion. In A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies, James Bamford reports on a high up CIA case officer who spent years running agents overseas. He had been reassigned to the unit charged with finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, but told Bamford that no one in his group ever found any indications of WMD in Iraq.

Bamford continues:

Nevertheless, there was a great deal of pressure to find a reason to go to war with Iraq. And the pressure was not just subtle; it was blatant. At one point in January 2003, the person’s boss called a meeting and gave them their marching orders. “And he said, ‘You know what—if Bush wants to go to war, it’s your job to give him a reason to do so’… He said it at the weekly office meeting. And I just remember saying, ‘This is something that the American public, if they ever knew, would be outraged’…He said it to about fifty people. And it’s funny because everyone still talks about that — ‘Remember when [he] said that.’”

In Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, Lindsay Moran comes out like a female Jack Bauer in a real life “24” series.

She writes:

During my short tenure in Iraqi Operations, I met one woman who had covered Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program for more than a decade. She admitted to me, unequivocally, that the CIA had no definitive evidence whatsoever that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed WMD, or that Iraq presented anything close to an imminent threat to the United States. Another CIA analyst, whose opinion I’d solicited about the connection between Al-Qa’ida and Iraq, looked at me almost shamefacedly, shrugged, and said, “They both have the letter q?” And a colleague who worked in the office covering Iraqi counterproliferation reported to me that her mealy-mouthed pen pusher of a boss had gathered together his minions and announced, “Let’s face it. The president wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it.”

If there was one man most responsible for the chest thumping about invading Iraq and the faulty intelligence used to push for the invasion, it would be Doug Feith. He is the Neo-con’s ‘Neo-con.’

A report released last month by the Pentagon Inspector General, examining intelligence failures in the leadup to the Iraq war, concentrated on The Office of Special Plans, run by Mr. Feith from the White House and Pentagon and advocating false dangers and the need to contain Iraq immediately with force.

According to the report, the activities of Feith’s group weren’t illegal, but they were:

“in our opinion, inappropriate, given that the intelligence assessments were [presented as] intelligence products and did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intelligence community.”

Mr. Feith’s website is a hoot because of it’s openly defensive nature…I guess it’s pretty hard NOT to be defensive when most of the journalism industry thinks you’re responsible for “the biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of the United States.”

One of the funny aspects is that on the front page is a quote from General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint chiefs of Staff:

“Doug Feith is a patriot. I have watched this man for four years. He cares only about what is best for the United States.”

I wonder if he ever discussed this with General Tommy Franks, who said in 2002 (referring to Feith) :

“The fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.”