If a man fools me once, shame on him. If a man fools me twice...
WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — President Bush’s national security advisers have ordered a delay in publication of evidence intended to support Washington’s contention that Iran supplies lethal technology and other aid to militias in Iraq, senior administration officials said Thursday.
The decision was described by officials who were struggling to explain why American officials in Baghdad have twice canceled plans to present the evidence, delays that have raised questions about the quality of the intelligence.
Some administration officials said there was a continuing debate about how well the information proved the Bush administration’s case.
One official who has reviewed elements of the briefing said the decision to delay it — made by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser — was also motivated by concern about potentially disclosing the sources of the intelligence, and by a debate over what might be the most politically opportune moment to press the case that Iran is the source of some of the most deadly attacks on American and Iraqi forces. [NYT]
Well, don't get fooled again.
From the same article...
The debate about how, when and whether to release the claims about Iran’s activities in Iraq is also an echo of Washington’s continuing debate about whether the administration has the credibility to make public evidence about Iran’s nuclear program — including data that it has shared with allies but not with the public.
In the most recent case, State Department officials have cautioned that the evidence must be rock-solid. The Pentagon has pressed for its release, to make clear why it is aggressively pursuing Iranians with military or paramilitary connections in Iraq.
The result has been a scramble, in which intelligence agencies have been trying to vet the Pentagon’s presentation to ensure that it does not contain claims that are not backed by solid evidence.
“We are trying to scrub this document, because the last thing we want to be accused of is cherry-picking,” said one American official familiar with the intelligence about Iran. [NYT]
The New York Times buries the lead once again. In the future, I'm going to start at the bottom of these stories and read up.
It's not until the final paragraph that we learn precisely why the promised PowerPoint presentation documenting Iran's military assistance to militia groups hasn't materialized: Because the evidence doesn't exist, and somebody tried to pass off a bunch of unsubstantiated claims as proof.
If we allow this country to go to war with Iran we will all carry the sin. We should really be in the streets protesting this if Bush starts beating the war drums again really hard. Our silence will speak volumes in the future.
Posted by: John Lucid | February 02, 2007 at 01:11 AM
" ...whether the administration has the credibility... "
They're joking, right?
Posted by: cfrost | February 02, 2007 at 01:52 AM
I'm certainly a major critic of the Iraq War and the Bush Administration. I was one of the first bloggers to condemn the war from day one because I was wary that: 1. War is the immoral taking of human life to achieve political ends. 2. Iran's power balance would be forever changed in the region, where for very little investment, Iran would become the undispited main power in the MidEast with a weakened Iraq.
For very little investment, Iran is no doubt working to hamper the U.S. peacekeeping mission in Baghdad. Their allies in the al-Sadr Mahdi Army would no doubt like to seize entire control of the Iraqi government if they could in a coup. The Badr Brigade militia, another Iranian ally, seized control of the Mayor's office in Baghdad two years ago in an armed coup.
However serious any Iranian intentions in Iraq are at this time, the far larger problem is that 370,000 U.S. arms are missing that were supposed to go to Iraqi army and police units due to corruption and theft. In addition, Iraq was like a giant ammo dump under Saddam Hussein, and the invading 2003 American and British forces were too small to capture all these arms and place them under their control or destroy them.
Most arms in the hands of insurgents are likely stolen U.S. arms, ones that were already in Iraq because of Saddam Hussein or else a few smuggled in from Jordan and Syria. Iran may be one of the smaller numbers of arms in Iraq. Yet all areas of arms to insurgents or militia groups need to be brought under control including from Iran. On the other hand, the Bush Administration cannot draw too much into a Iranian connection to shift blame from their own policy failures in Iraq or failure to control arms in other areas.
Posted by: Paul Hooson | February 02, 2007 at 11:08 AM
Yeah, they need to "check the quality" of the intelligence.
Like, you know, type it up. Instead of releasing the stuff scrawled in purple crayon on Shrubbies desktop blotter. Maybe redact those drawings with stick figures being killed by falling bombs, and mushroom clouds.
Mmm. Sources (Cheney's twisted imagination) and methods (incoherent paranoid babbling). Gotta protect 'em, see?
Posted by: Grumpy Physicist | February 02, 2007 at 11:14 AM