Iran - Back to the Future

It is back to the future as we watch the buildup to war with Iran and listen to the Bush Administration as they pull the same deception they used in their run up to the present war in Iraq. They lied then and they are telling the same tales now. Sunday, on the talk shows, they were out in force denying that they had cooked the intelligence books on Iraq. What follows is an exchange between Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday, Douglas Feith, who was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy as we got led into Iraq:

WALLACE: Okay. Let's talk about it, because the briefing was titled "Iraq and Al Qaeda Making the Case," and here are some of the highlights from your PowerPoint presentation. "Intelligence indicates cooperation in all categories, mature symbiotic relationship." "Some indications of possible Iraq coordination with Al Qaeda specifically related to 9/11." And you said an alleged meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague in April 2001 was a known contact. Mr. Feith, all of that--all of that was wrong, wasn't it?

FEITH: No, not at all. There was substantial intelligence. I mean, evidence is a legal term not really appropriate here. There was a lot of information out there. Intelligence is very sketchy, and it's always open to interpretation. On this issue, there were people who disagreed about the intelligence and the people in the Pentagon were giving a critical review. They were not presenting alternative conclusions. They were presenting a challenge to the way the CIA was looking at things and filtering its own information.

WALLACE: I have to tell you, I mean, when I--I mean, I read these as "mature symbiotic relationship," "known contact"--that sure sounds like conclusions.
FEITH: You're plucking language out of a briefing, the thrust of which was why is the CIA accounting for information that it had that suggested an Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship when the CIA was excluding that information from its own finished intelligence at the time. It was a criticism. It's healthy to criticize the CIA's intelligence. What the people in the Pentagon were doing was right. It was good government.

Up is down, left is right, in is out, but more importantly, with this administration, wrong becomes right and outright lies are their gospel truth.

So far we have lost more that 3000 of our troops in Iraq and gained nothing. How many will Bush sacrifice in Iran, and what will it achieve?

True North