Chutzpah is a Yiddish term that means “unbelievable gall; insolence; audacity”. Got to love Yiddish. No other term captures what the Republican staff members of the House Intelligence Committee accomplished today with the release of a partisan report on Iran (.pdf). According to the Washington Post account:
A key House committee issued a stinging critique of U.S. intelligence on Iran yesterday, charging that the CIA and other agencies lack “the ability to acquire essential information necessary to make judgments” on Tehran’s nuclear program, its intentions or even its ties to terrorism.
Gee whiz, “lack of essential information”? Like what? Nuclear weapons? Which brings me to Valerie Plame.
Valerie’s identity was exposed by Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and others in Bush Administration in the summer of 2003 while she was doing undercover work to monitor, detect, and interdict nuclear technology going to Iran. Larisa Alexandrovna broke the story on Raw Story in February 2006. David Shuster confirmed the report on Hardball on 2 May 2006:
While the heart of the CIA leak investigation is the Bush administration`s aggressive defense of the WMD case for war in Iraq, there is new evidence now the defense may have undermined intelligence efforts on Iran.The key player in the CIA leak story is Valerie Wilson, a CIA operative whose identity was outed by White House officials. As MSNBC first reported yesterday, Wilson was not just undercover but, according to intelligence sources, was part of an effort three years ago to monitor the proliferation of nuclear weapons material into Iran.
So, the Republicans want to whine about inadequate intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program while holding fund raisers for Scooter Libby, one of the men implicated in the leak of Valerie’s classified identity? Excuse me? The leak did more than ruin Val’s ability to continue working as an undercover CIA officer. The leak destroyed a U.S. intelligence program to collect information about Iran’s efforts to get nuclear weapons material.
What is particularly galling about this is how Peter Hoekstra has played politics with intelligence all along. In a letter to the White House earlier this year complaining about the possible appointment of Stephen Kappes as the Deputy Director of the CIA, Hoekstra said:
I am convinced that this politicization was underway well before Porter Goss became the Director. In fact, I have long been convinced that a strong and well-positioned group within the Agency intentionally undermined the Administration and its policies. This argument is supported by the Ambassador Wilson/Valerie Plame events, as well as by the string of unauthorized disclosures from an organization that prides itself with being able to keep secrets.
Instead of mounting an investigation to determine who exposed Mrs. Wilson and the intelligence operation she worked on, Hoekstra attacks CIA officers for being political hacks. Mr. Hoekstra, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t chuck stones.
We now see a new effort by the Republicans to bully the intelligence community into identifying an imminent threat that does not exist. Iran has been a threat for 26 years. As reported in the Washington Post and New York Times, the intelligence community does not believe Iran is anywhere near to developing or deploying a nuclear weapon.
Peter Hoekstra wants to use his position as head of the Intelligence Committee to bully analysts and scare Americans. Meanwhile, he has sat idle as the Republican White House destroyed a viable intelligence operation to keep tabs on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. That, my friends, is pure Chutzpah.
Mazeltov.
Please don’t forget that Cheney and Bush’s main man in Iraq was thought to have revealed to Iran that we had broken Iran’s secret code. This all broke at the same time that Bush and Cheney had to testify in the Plame case. Gee, I wonder if we had to raise the national security level during that time period?
Could it be that the main point of outing Plame was that they knew she would develop intelligence verifying that Iran wasn’t as great a threat as Cheney needs it to be?
Now just watch the disinformation – the “think tanks” and their white papers, the pundits, the talking heads, the editorialists, the “journalists” who don’t quite get the facts straight, the “exile dissidents” who are given platforms, the scaremongers, the hatemongers, the retired generals, the rumours and unsourced claims that are repeated over and over until they magically become “true” , the Hitler/Chamberlain comparisons, the “civilizational warriors”, the maps with false missile radius marks ….
9-11 happened under Bush and the Republicans watch.
They appear the only party to actually demonstrate their weakness on national defense and national security.
Most informed commentators believe that an attack on Iran will lead to the destruction of the American force in Iraq as Iran retaliates. I would guess that this would lead to the destruction of the Republican Party for decades. Might be an acceptable price.
How can the destruction of an American force be an acceptable price to pay for a political gain? That’s what the republicans do.
There’s a fine line these days between vigorously opposing the war and those who got us into it, and being labeled anti-American and risking being disappeared as a terrorist. I can accept that risk. But to accept the loss of 130,000 Americans as a way to remove the other party from power is to flirt with treason and become, or reveal, that the opposition is no better than those we fight against. It’s one thing to oppose the actions of the government and the military, but it’s entirely unacceptable to see American troops as throw away game pieces.
Excellent Larry, you’re like oxygen – gotta have it! I’m not trying to beat a dead horse but Hallibuton was doin’ biz in Iran until fairly recently, if I recall it was them & GE that were the last US businesses to pull out.
Thanks,
taters