been there, done that.

It doesn't matter. If the Vice President wants to attack Iran, its going to happen.

Just like Iraq.

No doubt these liberal, terrorist-lovin international abominations can be trusted with the truth. They cant handle it.

I agree with Ten.

Unfortunately, if President Cheney decides to attack Iran, it's probably just going to happen.

The most disturbing thing about what's taken place since the 2006 elections in the Cheney WH is that he has simply decided to tell the American people to go fuck themselves.

He's truly a rogue President; nothing will stop him.

Anyone watching Leslie Blitzer? Sy Hersh was one. Interesting.

The US has lost all credibility. The morons in this government are DELIBERATELY putting out false information. If no one trusts any information, they can just make blatantly false statements, and these will have as much credence as a true statement.

It's an amazing strategy.

I vividly remember 4 years ago as my nation "readied" for war against Iraq. It was no secret that we had been bombing the desert since the first Gulf War, now we were going to strike big time.

And so we did. We Shocked and Awed the Iraqi Army into bits and pieces, then we disbanded it after the invasion.

Not one bit of credible Intelligence was used to justify all this.

Rather, our self-appointed Veep-in-Chief decided that it was time to be greeted as liberators and plant ourselves lock-stock-and-barrel in the heart of Iraq.

Now we are gearing up for a massive war against all Islamofacists we can drudge up.

Welcome to perpetuawar folks.

What's the point of spending billions on the CIA when the information goes unheeded?

What's the point of our democracy when our Veep says he's not even a "real" branch of the Government? And then acts with impunity, again, and again, despite the intelligents(and ladies) telling him otherwise.

a bit off topic:

dead ender logic check...

so....

if it snows....anywhere...that debunks global warming...

but..

a bombing in bagdad....doesnt debunk the surge?

[Insert sounds of gnashing teeth]

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on...me, or something.

Sy Hersh's story about the US secretely funding groups with ties to Al Qaeda is dynamite. The MSM will not repeat it. If they do Bush and Cheney will be in very real danger of being impeached. The cry won't just come from a few dissaffected liberals. It will come from right across the spectrum.

The IAEA and UN always side with the evil ones; we just can't trust them. The only answer is to go into Iran and have a look around ourselves. If we don't find anything, it's only because they've moved it across the border--probably to Iraq! Because the intelligence we get from Cheney's Special Plans is always good. Well, their only weakness is somehow missing it whenever weapons are transported across international borders.

Kevin - you missed this

According to a British diplomat who spoke to an Al-Siyasa correspondent, Turkey will not repeat the mistake it made in 2003, when it refused to open its airspace to U.S. Air Force overflights en route to attacking Iraq.

Why a British diplomat would make such a comment when The Poodle has said:

"There is, as far as I know, no planning going on to make an attack on Iran and people are pursuing a diplomatic and political solution... because it's the only solution that anyone can think of that is viable and sensible."

But then again you have to wonder why the "UK doubles naval presence in Persian Gulf".

When you put a bunch of Texas oil millionaires in charge of the government, what else can you expect?

Kevin - you missed this

According to a British diplomat who spoke to an Al-Siyasa correspondent, Turkey will not repeat the mistake it made in 2003, when it refused to open its airspace to U.S. Air Force overflights en route to attacking Iraq.

If you think, like me, that things have been a little quiet here on Political Animal for a while read Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker entitled The Redirection. Read all of it, including the last pages where it talks about the US funnelling money to groups with ties to Al Qaeda as part of its efforts in Lebanon.

It is clear that America has a shadow government run out of the VP's office. It is also clear that the real levers of power are being pulled by Prince Bandar and the Israeli government. America doesn't have a real foreign policy apparatus. Just a bunch of halfwit cowboys playing geopolitics.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070305fa_fact_hersh?page=1

With one minor difference, Kevin. This from an article in Ha'aretz:

"Al-Siyasa further reported that NATO leaders are urging Turkey to open its airspace for an Attack on Iran as well and to also open its airports and borders in case of a ground attack.

According to a British diplomat who spoke to an Al-Siyasa correspondent, Turkey will not repeat the mistake it made in 2003, when it refused to open its airspace to U.S. Air Force overflights en route to attacking Iraq." (Emphasis added.)

Nobody was better than Billmon at noting thisngs without comment.

Ah, Kevin.

Just like you Kevin, and your gaggle of looney libs here. Deploring anything American and embracing everything Euro.

Where in your post are your balancing statements from the US government? This is a truley one sided masterpeace on your part.

Whose to say our intelligence is bad? The French? Of course the French are going to say stuff like this, their trying to save their little froggy behinds because of their poor decisions back in '03. They and the Germans have been largely sidelined in the New Middle East.

The truth is, we'll never know the truth about the WMD, because Saddam secretly moved his WMD into Syria before the inspectors came. If you don't believe that, heh, let me have some of what your smoking.

Read the New Yorker article today by Sy Hersh.

The key point> Our government is giving money to Al Qaeda.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070305fa_fact_hersh?page=1

I just hope you liberals can learn from experience. When the evidence is thin you can either cower and wait for the terrorists to nuke us, or you can have the guts and bold leadership to act. Reagan was the same way. That's why people say he was an acter, because he knew that you had to act now, and think later.

"Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." -- The Second Best President Ever

The proof is right here

So Ha'aretz is reporting that three Sunni Arab states are willing to let Americans use their Airspace to attack Shi'ite Iran. What interest could they possibly have in that gambit, so you suppose? I'm just afraid the fucking clowns in charge will be led down that brimstone path.

"US Intelligence": wouldn't that be a fine example of an oxymoron?

From Mr. Hersh's article. He was on CNN today: "Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.

I was subsequently told by the two government consultants and the former senior intelligence official that the echoes of Iran-Contra were a factor in Negroponte’s decision to resign from the National Intelligence directorship and accept a sub-Cabinet position of Deputy Secretary of State. (Negroponte declined to comment.)

The former senior intelligence official also told me that Negroponte did not want a repeat of his experience in the Reagan Administration, when he served as Ambassador to Honduras. “Negroponte said, ‘No way. I’m not going down that road again, with the N.S.C. running operations off the books, with no finding.’ ”
...
“This goes back to Iran-Contra,” a former National Security Council aide told me. “And much of what they’re doing is to keep the agency out of it.” He said that Congress was not being briefed on the full extent of the U.S.-Saudi operations. And, he said, “The C.I.A. is asking, ‘What’s going on?’ They’re concerned, because they think it’s amateur hour.”

“The C.I.A. is asking, ‘What’s going on?’ They’re concerned, because they think it’s amateur hour.”

And the C.I.A. would be right.

You know a policy stinks to high heavens when John Negroponte wants to distance himself from it.

We should affix the following legend (said by the British Intelligence guy in a report to his government in 2002) to the signs at DoD, CIA, White House, and Old Executive Office Building (where the VP Cheney rules):

"the intelligence is being fixed to fit the policy".

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/02/25/seymour-hersh-negroponte-iran-contra-fundsoh-my/

Above--Seymour Hersh interview with Wolf Blitzer today--video is at crooks and liars

February 1:

"U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday that the United States is 'not planning for a war with Iran.'" (CNN)

"'Nobody is planning, we are not planning for a war with Iran,' Gates said." (Jerusalem Post)

"Nobody is planning, we are not planning for a war with Iran," Gates said." (Associated Press as reported on FoxNews)

February 10:

"Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, said yesterday: 'I don't know how many times the president, secretary [of state Condoleezza] Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran.'" (London Guardian)

I am posting all this to call your attention to a very, very significant point.

Note that in all the accounts, Secretary Gates asserted that the United States is not PLANNING for an attack on Iran or a war with Iran.

Note further that Secretary Gates is NOT using the usual rubric of the Bush Administration that there are NO PLANS.

Gates is asserting quite clearly that no planning is taking place in the Pentagon for an attack on Iran or a war with Iran. Again, no PLANNING.

Now, having said that, we must take into consideration other folks who maintain that indeed there is planning going on in the Pentagon for an attack against Iran and even a war with Iran.

So, to the main point: Someone is lying. And if Secretary Gates is lying, then the Bush Administration is lying as Gates is the Bush Administration in the Pentagon.

Forget the "all options are on the table" rhetoric.

Gates is saying there is no planning; others are maintainig there is planning, not just plans, but planning.

Should Gates be lying, then that lie extends beyond the Pentagon and embraces the Bush Administration itself and that means President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

And that, folks, is an impeachable offense.

And that means the Congress should seriously inquire of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary Gates on the matter . . . and should do so without delay.

Above--Seymour Hersh interview with Wolf Blitzer today--video is at crooks and liars

And to think that I wanted to destroy this dog's career 30 years ago...

Am I not, positively prescient?

[insert molars-being-grounded sound here]

Excerpts from Frank Rich's article "Where Were You That Summer of 2001?" which can be obtained on donkeyod.wordpress.com

"Cable surfers have tuned out Iraq for a war with laughs: the battle over Anna Nicole’s decomposing corpse. Set this cultural backdrop against last week’s terrifying but little-heeded front-page Times account of American “intelligence and counterterrorism officials” leaking urgent warnings about Al Qaeda’s comeback, and ask yourself: Haven’t we been here before?

...Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces — it’s “not ready for transition,” according to the Pentagon’s last report — but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

...Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?

The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice.

...As Mr. Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official, reiterated last week: “Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to address the threat to America, that’s where it is.” It’s typical of Mr. Bush’s self-righteousness, however, that he would rather punt on that threat than own up to a mistake.

...Five years after 9/11, the terrorists would seem to have us just where they want us — asleep — even as the system is blinking red once again."

"Where in your post are your balancing statements from the US government?"

How could statements from the US government be "balancing?" The US governemnt has been so consistantly wrong that they are simply no longer a credible source of information. How does made-up bullshit balance investigative reporting?

"The truth is, we'll never know the truth about the WMD, because Saddam secretly moved his WMD into Syria before the inspectors came. If you don't believe that, heh, let me have some of what your smoking."

I don't believe it, do you have any evidence? And I mean real evidence, not artist renderings of would wmd's would look like if they were in Syria. And if these wmd's were moved, why do we have no satellite pictures of the relocation? You'd think the relocation of a large centrifuge array would be fairly obvious. And you'd think the the construction of a facility in Syria would show up pretty clearly on satellite images. We do know where such facitlites are in Iran because they are real and their construction was obvious. And we have the satellite photos to prove it. Why is that not the case for similar structures in Syria. Is it because they are imaginary?

By the way, you can have what I'm smoking. They are cigarettes. Go to the store.

Keep up the paranoia moonbats. Bush will never invade Iran.

The truth is, we'll never know the truth about the WMD, because Saddam secretly moved his WMD into Syria before the inspectors came. If you don't believe that, heh, let me have some of what your smoking.

I don't share my weed with trolls.

"Keep up the paranoia moonbats. Bush will never invade Iran."

Of course not.He'll "liberate" them.

A point about the pre-war intelligence concerning WMDs and Iraq that has never been discussed is this: Even if the intelligence had been accurate, it did not justify invading and occupying a country. If the mere existence of WMDs in a country with religious extremists justified an invasion, why didn't we invade Pakistan, or Israel, years before?? Only if there were WMDs and evidence that Saddam intended to use them against us, would an invasion have been justified. And there was no evidence of this intent. None. Nada. Zilch.

About Iran, at least there was the encouraging news that some generals will resign if Bush attacks Iran. Is sanity breaking out among the American military?

Donkey_Courage: Be afraid

Well, the fact that our Iranian intelligence is garbage is simply the exception that proves the rule....

For ye of little memory:

Here are some of the places Anonymous Defense Department Sources fed to a credulous media on the locations of Iraq's WMD:

Iraq's WMDs are hidden in the desert, the WMDs are hidden in caves, they are aboard railway cars, they are hidden underwater, the WMDs are in Iran, they're in Syria, in Jordan -- and my favorite of all favorites, Iraq's WMDs are aboard a "ghost ship" plying the Arabian Sea and being trailed by the U.S. Navy.

I am not, repeat NOT, making this up. Most of the stories originated under the byline of Bill Gertz in The Washington Times during the run-up to the Iraq War and shortly after the invasion. The stories were picked up by The Associated Press and others and were spread worldwide.

I did say that I am NOT making it up, didn't I? But they were.

Here's a link:

http://tinyurl.com/3cxzgn

Note further that Secretary Gates is NOT using the usual rubric of the Bush Administration that there are NO PLANS. Gates is asserting quite clearly that no planning is taking place in the Pentagon for an attack on Iran or a war with Iran. Again, no PLANNING.

Well, sure. After all, we obviously didn't have a plan -- if by that one means a carefully considered strategy with calculated risk/reward ratios and fallback positions -- for war with Iraq, either. We just kind of threw the whole thing together slapdash. So Gates saying we don't have a "plan" for war with Iran may indeed be technically accurate, since closing your eyes, mumbling a quick prayer and then rolling the dice isn't really anything that could be called a plan....

Stefan, have you checked your (real) email?

The truth is, we'll never know the truth about the WMD, because Saddam secretly moved his WMD into Syria before the inspectors came. If you don't believe that, heh, let me have some of what your smoking.

Huh. So we caused 600,000 lives to be lost and spent a trillion dollars solely in order to transfer ownership of these supposed WsMD from one ruthless Baathist dictatorship that didn't have strong ties to Islamist terror groups, to another Baathist dictatorship that actually does have strong ties to Hezbollah? The whole point of the war was to allow Assad to equip himself with WsMD? Well then, mission accomplished....

Not yet, will later this evening.

The U.N. is welcome to set up its own intelligence agency if they don't like U.S. information. While they're at it, they could pay for their own armed forces and have someone else besides the U.S. picking up most of their bills.

Or to put it more bluntly, I don't see any other nations accomplishing anything useful with Iran either.

Someone is lying. Who? What should be done about it? Should Congress demand the facts?

Well-informed folks are claiming that planning is going on at the Pentagon for an attack on Iran and probably a war.

The Bush Administration is saying outright that no planning is going on.

Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.
-from Seymour Hersh's current New Yorker article

Be warned....here we go again....how much more insanity will this Administration get away with before people will take to the streets in opposition??

From an article at timesonline.co.uk about the risk of the Cheney administration going again to war:

"But there are deep fissures within the US Administration. Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary, who has previously called for direct talks with Tehran, is said to be totally opposed to military action.
Although he has dispatched a second US aircraft carrier to the Gulf, he is understood to believe that airstrikes would inflame Iranian public opinion and hamper American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. One senior adviser to Mr Gates has even stated privately that military action could lead to Congress impeaching Mr Bush.

The hawks are led by Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, who is urging Mr Bush to keep the military option “on the table”. He is also pressing the Pentagon to examine specific war plans — including, it is rumored, covert action.

But Mr Blair, in a BBC interview, said: “I can’t think that it would be right to take military action against Iran . . . What is important is to pursue the political, diplomatic channel.
I think it is the only way that we are going to get a sensible solution to the Iranian issue.”
The Prime Minister’s comments reflect what British officials have been saying privately for some time, but also show a growing streak of independence from Mr Bush. The White House was unhappy with the timing of Mr Blair’s announcement this week on withdrawing 1,600 British troops, concerned that it undercut Mr Bush’s efforts to shore up support for his troop surge on Capitol Hill while sending out “mixed messages” to the Iranians."

Hersh's revelations that the GWB admin is funding al Qaeda are nothing new.

The Iranians have been complaining for quite awhile about US supported AQ terrorism on their Afgan border.

Disputo, does that email work?

Hi, Global Citizen. Great to see you again!

Hi CWA - How have you been?

Been super. Life is good

Good to hear. Things are returning to a semblance of normalcy on my end.

I am sending you something funny

It is clear that America has a shadow government run out of the VP's office. It is also clear that the real levers of power are being pulled by Prince Bandar and the Israeli government.

Dick Cheney - Worst American Who Ever Lived (tm)

normalcy is not a word, dammit!

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme right wing.

I wonder what other sources of intelligence are followed by UN inspectors. As in most other things of international importance, the UN must rely upon the information it gets from its members. Yet, this is the organization that supposedly provides legitimacy for international action?

Trashy uses the shitty quality of OVP's stovepiped intelligence to bash the U.N. Hilarious!

Trashy uses the shitty quality of OVP's stovepiped intelligence to bash the U.N. Hilarious!

It's the Animal House defense: "You fucked up. You trusted us."

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