Doug’s Dynamic Drivel

Once bitten, twice shy. The 16 different in the US are not toeing Cheney’s line anymore. wants a on that will give him the goods to go ahead bomb them back to the stone age. He ain’t getting it. Like his puppet Bush, he’s a lame duck (although in his case that’s a rabid lame duck), and the boys from Langley aren’t co-operating anymore (well you can hardly blame them after now can you.)

Spooks refuse to toe Cheney’s line on Iran
By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear program. The aim is to make the document more supportive of Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts provided by participants in the NIE process to two former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without thosedissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the “unsatisfactory” draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.

A coordinates the judgments of the US’s 16 intelligence agencies on a specific country or issue.

A former intelligence officer who has asked not to be identified told Inter Press Service (IPS) that an official involved in the NIE process says the Iran estimate was ready to be published a year ago but has been delayed because the director of national intelligence wanted a draft reflecting a consensus on key conclusions - particularly on Iran’s .

[snip]

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi provided a similar account, based on his own sources in the intelligence community. He told IPS that intelligence analysts have had to review and rewrite their findings three times, because of pressure from the White House.

“The White House wants a document that it can use as evidence for its Iran policy,” says Giraldi. Despite pressures on them to change their dissenting conclusions, however, Giraldi says some analysts have refused to go along with conclusions that they believe are not supported by the evidence.

In October 2006, Giraldi wrote in The American Conservative that the NIE on Iran had already been completed, but that Cheney’s office had objected to its findings on both the Iranian nuclear program and Iran’s role in Iraq. The draft NIE did not conclude that there was confirming evidence that Iran was arming Shi’ite insurgents in Iraq, according to Giraldi. (more at Asia Times Online

It’s the old story of fixing the evidence in advance to create the bogeyman, which if you’ve watched “The Power of Nightmares” videos you’ll recognize right away from the days of the cold war and the neo-con insistence of “cooking the books” on the intel on the Soviet Union in order to undermine Kissinger’s peace plans (It’s hard to think of Kissinger in a positive light but it’s inescapable when comparing him to the neo-cons.)

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