By Mr. Curmudgeon
Back in 2007, during the bad old days of the Bush administration, many around the world – including the left here at home – worried after reading press reports that warned of an impending Bush attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups,” wrote Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine. “The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.”
As if by magic, members of America’s crack intelligence community leaked portions of a National Intelligence Estimate, parts of which were later declassified. “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” said the report. Democrats in Congress used the report to rein in any attempt by Bush to needlessly confront Iran on its nonexistent nuclear program. ABC News described the NIE report as creating an “embarrassing situation for the United States as it pushes for a third United Nations resolution against Iran for its nuclear activities.”
The insightful neocon Norman Podhoretz made an interesting point during the controversy regarding the CIA leak. “...I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.”
Today, the New York Times reports, “The United Nation’s nuclear inspectors declared for the first time on Thursday that extensive information they have collected raised concerns about ‘past or current undisclosed activities’ by Iran’s military to develop a nuclear weapon. The unusually strongly worded conclusion seems certain to accelerate Iran’s confrontation with much of the rest of the world.” However, the Times offered a glimmer of hope to Obama’s supporters on the radical fringe, assuring them that “several of President Obama’s top national security advisers have questioned it.”
The Times continued, “Perhaps the most startling revelation in the report is that for the first time Iran told inspectors it was preparing to make its uranium into a metallic form — a step that can be explained by some civilian applications, but is widely viewed as necessary for making the core of an atom bomb.”
If our CIA wasn’t so secretive (that is, when it isn’t leaking misinformation to the New York Times) it would offer a one-word statement in response to the U.N. report, “Oops.”
Back in the 1980s, President Reagan was roundly criticized for running a secret intelligence network from the White House basement. The effort, you may recall, was to overthrow the socialist Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua. Reagan understood what Republican administrations that followed him never figured out: that the CIA is a worthless intelligence gathering body with a leftist and subversive contingent working to undermine American efforts against dangerous external enemies.
Nearly a decade has passed since 9/11, and the paper-shuffling hacks at the CIA still can’t get it right. That intelligence failure cost 3,000 Americans their lives. Will it take the destruction of an entire U.S. city before we wake up to the dangerous inadequacies of the CIA?
We can only hope that when President Obama leaves office in 2012, the Palin administration will do away with the CIA and the Tea Party Congress will charter a new intelligence agency – with Dick Cheney as its director. Hey, if Massachusetts can elect a Republican to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, anything is possible.
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