Quoth Ed Morrissey:
I've frequently been astonished at the degree to which many of my Liberal friends are under the impression that the CIA under Bush had been some sort of hawkish, Conservative (or gasp Neoconservative) tool of the Bush Agenda. What I have tried, patiently, to explain is that the CIA is a government agency, staffed primarily by career bureaucrats who stay on across various administrations, and are generally of an academic (read: Liberal) bent. Being in a bit of a rush at the moment (welcome, if exhaustingly full client load today), I'm not able to drop many links (and there are many) which show that the CIA was actively engaged in trying to undermine the Bush administration. Perhaps I'll be able to back-fill that in comments (or maybe Mr Hengist can lend a hand). Suffice to say, this is a particularly glaring example of how the politicization of intelligence has been alive and well...just not in the ways which are likely to find much play on the pages of The Nation.This cannot be explained merely by incompetence. The facility at Qom had not been declared by Iran as part of its “peaceful” nuclear program in 2007 when the NIE was written. It is, as the Journal notes, too small for commercial purposes, but perfectly suited for military purposes, which is probably why the elite Revolutionary Guard secures it to this day. No one with this information could possibly have concluded anything except that the Iranians had hidden its military applications of uranium enrichment in Qom.
This is a dangerous disgrace, and I hope that the heads which, in a just world, would roll for this will not come from bodies with too much blood on their hands.
1 comment:
The 2007 NIE was a politically motivated kneecapping of Bush Administration efforts to take action against the Iranian nuclear weapons program. IIRC, the 2007 NIE was artfully worded and only said that the Iranian nuclear weapons program was stopped in 2003, but that wording did not preclude its having restarted subsequent to that.
Furthermore, the Bush Administration must have know about this enrichment facility, and so we can cast blame upon Bush for not declassifying that information in order to discredit the 2007 NIE and the Liberals who used it to protect Iran.
As for the CIA's undermining of the Bush Administration, I would suggest our readers do a Google Advanced Search of www.powerlineblog.com for "CIA leak". The notion that the CIA is conservative, rightwing, or neoconservative, is a laughably outdated holdover from decades past.
Iran is a rogue nation hostile to the West, and Israel and the United States in particular. They are building a nuclear bomb which will probably be used against us, perhaps via their proxy terrorists Hezbollah, or perhaps delivered via a nuclear tipped missile, which they're also working on. Dovish Liberals have deluded themselves for years that all this alarmism about the "peaceful" Iranian nuclear program was just a neocon plot to precipitate a conquering attack on the oil-producing nation of Iran. Such fantasies bought Iran what they needed most: time. Sanctions, while never a realistic possibility due to the unwavering support of Russia, North Korea, and China, are now longer a viable because they could not work in time to stop Iran from getting the Bomb.
The inability or politically-motivated unwillingness of Liberals to face reality has made the world a more dangerous place in which our options have become progressively more limited. Nice going, Liberals.
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