Intelligence Ignored

By now, you've all heard that Bush & Co. kept strangely quiet about this past summer's intelligence reports on the Iran nuclear program. I'll leave it up to you to decide why.

I'm not even going to try to convince you that Bush and Cheney need to be impeached. Because if you don't get it by now, you simply don't want to.

In the following clip Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Joseph Cirincione tells CNN that six weeks after President George Bush threatened Iran with "World War III," and nearly six years after he declared Iran part of an "axis of evil," a new National Intelligence Estimate says Iran ended its nuclear weapons work four years ago. In an abrupt turnabout from previous estimates, the intelligence agencies of the executive branch conclude in the NIE that "Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggest it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005," adding, "We do not know whether [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.

In the following video, Josh Marshall of TPMtv takes a look at how the White House is trying to spin this situation.

In his op-ed piece for today's NY TImes, columnist Thomas L Friedman takes a satirical look at Iran's intelligence on the US. Hopefully, Iran's government is ignoring their reports as much as the the White House is ignoring theirs.

excerpt from:

Intercepting Iran’s Take on America

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: December 5, 2007

The Iranian National Intelligence Estimate of America — my guess — would read something like this.

To: President Ahmadinejad

From: The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence

Subject: America

As you’ll recall, in the wake of 9/11, we were extremely concerned that the U.S. would develop a covert program to end its addiction to oil, which would be the greatest threat to Iranian national security. In fact, after Bush’s 2006 State of the Union, in which he decried America’s oil addiction, we had “high confidence” that a comprehensive U.S. clean energy policy would emerge. We were wrong.

Our fears that the U.S. was engaged in a covert “Manhattan Project” to achieve energy independence have been “assuaged.” America’s Manhattan Project turns out to be largely confined to the production of corn ethanol in Iowa, which, our analysts have confirmed from cellphone intercepts between lobbyists and Congressmen, is nothing more than a multibillion-dollar payoff to big Iowa farmers and agro-businesses.

True, thanks to Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. Congress decided to increase the miles per gallon required of U.S. car fleets by the year 2020 — which took us by surprise — but we nevertheless “strongly believe” this will not lead to any definitive breaking of America’s oil addiction, since none of the leading presidential candidates has offered an energy policy that would include a tax on oil or carbon that could trigger a truly transformational shift in America away from fossil fuels.

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