It goes back to 1976 with these damn neo-cons (Paul Wolfowitz and
Richard Perle and others).

Craig Unger
A Failure of Intelligence

Posted December 9, 2007 | 06:44 PM (EST)


Intelligence failures, intelligence failures. The United States spends
more than $40 billion a year on intelligence, but, gosh darn it, we
just can't seem to get it right. The latest fiasco, of course,
concerns the now infamous National Intelligence Estimate about Iran
which concludes that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program more
than four years ago.

Let me suggest, however, that the real problem is not repeated
intelligence failures, as conventional wisdom has it. In fact, I
believe we have the opposite problem -- namely, intelligence
successes. By that I mean successful disinformation operations, black
propaganda operations that have promoted falsehoods for decades in an
extraordinarily successful series of attempts to mislead the American
people and shape U.S. foreign policy to serve neo-conservative
ideological ends.

One can trace such operations back to 1976, when a number of young
neoconservatives, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, helped
assemble a group of hawkish anti-Communist foreign policymakers to put
together intelligence showing that that the "liberal" CIA had
dangerously underestimated the Soviet threat. Even though U.S.-Soviet
relations had thawed considerably thanks to détente, Team B, as the
group became known, thought that the Soviets wanted to wipe out
America, so it created a report showing a Soviet Union hell bent on
world domination. It had no factual evidence to back up its assertion
that the Soviets had a top secret non-acoustic antisubmarine system.
Nevertheless, it concluded that the Soviets had probably "deployed
some operational non-acoustic systems and will deploy more in the next
few years." The absence of evidence, it reasoned, merely proved how
secretive the Soviets were!

Similarly, in the early '80s, neo-con firebrand Michael Ledeen falsely
blamed the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II on the KGB. In a
1987 article in The Nation, Italian intelligence operative Francesco
Pazienza said that Ledeen "was the person responsible for dreaming up
the 'Bulgarian connection' behind the plot to kill the Pope." Again, a
disinformation scam heated up the Cold War.

More recently, of course, there were the Niger documents, the
forgeries that said Saddam agreed to buy 500 tons of yellowcake
uranium from the Republic of Niger. Astoundingly, as I report in my
new book, The Fall of the House of Bush, on at least 13 different
occasions Western authorities discredited the information in the Niger
documents, yet they still found their way into President Bush's 2003
"State of the Union" address as a casus belli to start a war against
Iraq. No fewer than nine former intelligence and military analysts who
have served in the C.I.A., the State Department, the Defense
Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.), and the Pentagon told me on the record
that they believed that the Niger documents were part of a covert
operation to deliberately mislead the American public and start a war
with Iraq.

All of which brings us to U.S. policy with Iran -- and a narrative
that by now should be all too familiar, but that somehow still escapes
the attention of the mainstream press. In December 2001, secret back
channel meetings took place in Rome between Michael Ledeen and
Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian arms dealer and con man. Members of
the Mujahideen e-Khalq, or MEK, an urban-guerrilla group of Iranian
dissidents that practices a peculiar brand of revolutionary Marxism,
reportedly attended, suggesting that a rogue group of neo-cons had
notions about trying to implement regime change in Iran. In August
2006, House intelligence committee chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-MI)
released a congressional report which overstated both the number and
range of Iran's missiles and neglected to mention that the
International Atomic Energy Agency found no evidence of weapons
production or activity. And, of course, there have been countless
reports that an Iranian nuclear weapon was imminent.

Last week, however, with the release of the Iran NIE, intelligence
professionals from the CIA and analysts from the State Department
finally triumphed over the neo-con ideologues for change. As a result,
former ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, a hard-liner if
ever there was one, is now screaming that the NIE may be a product of
"disinformation" from Iran and that someone "is pursuing a policy
agenda."

It is fair to say that many unanswered questions remain about Iran's
intentions. But if history is any guide, John Bolton has it exactly
backwards.

<edspyhill01@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:f6b9629a-726c-4bbf-943a-71ad4aa83a7f@i29g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
It goes back to 1976 with these damn neo-cons (Paul Wolfowitz and
Richard Perle and others).

Craig Unger
A Failure of Intelligence

Posted December 9, 2007 | 06:44 PM (EST)

It all comes down to a simple question -
Was the intelligence community lying to the American people THEN, or are
they lying to us NOW.

(more than likely, the answer would seem to be - Both Times.).

"mack" <mackerel@dslextreme.com> wrote in message
news:13lrcq58ame679f@corp.supernews.com...
>
> <edspyhill01@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:f6b9629a-726c-4bbf-943a-71ad4aa83a7f@i29g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> It goes back to 1976 with these damn neo-cons (Paul Wolfowitz and
> Richard Perle and others).
>
> Craig Unger
> A Failure of Intelligence
>
> Posted December 9, 2007 | 06:44 PM (EST)
>
> It all comes down to a simple question -
> Was the intelligence community lying to the American people THEN, or are
> they lying to us NOW.
>
> (more than likely, the answer would seem to be - Both Times.).

Do you have a problem with consistency?


>