At the start of this week,
the big news was the NIE Report which Dick Cheney had suppressed for up to a year by some accounts. While he and W. had attempted to sell the nation another war of choice in the Middle East—this time against a phantom nuclear armed Iran---the US intelligence community had already concluded that the Iranians had stopped their nuclear weapons program back in 2003. Maybe with Saddam no longer a threat, Iran did not need nukes as a deterrent against their biggest enemy. Maybe world pressure had worked. No matter what the cause, it was not news that the White House wanted to hear. The NeoCon agenda (which dates back to the first oil crisis of the 1970s) called for appropriating nationalized oil all around the world, including that which lies under Persian soil.
So, Dick Cheney kept Americans from hearing the truth---that Iran had no nukes and wasn’t trying to build nukes---while he and W. went on a cross country tour for a solid year trying to instill the terrifying image of mushroom clouds rising over Israel or engulfing US troops in Iraq. As Keith Olbermann and others have made quite clear, Bush himself knew about the NIE at least by August. Calculated liar that he is, Bush continued to deceive to the public by innuendo and by withholding the truth for three more months---why? In hopes that he could provoke a war in the meantime that would render the NIE irrelevant? More than likely.
Finally, the report could be delayed no longer. The backlash was much worse that Bush and Cheney could have imagined. A majority of U.S. citizens had suspected all along that they were being lied to about Iran by an administration that wanted to start another war of choice for oil. Here was the proof, in black and white, from the same intelligence community which had possessed doubts about Saddam’s WMDs. Bush ignored the CIA back in 2003 and look what a mess that had caused.
Never again! Early last week, we heard speculation about Congressional investigations to find out about when and how much Bush and Cheney knew when they were giving their “Iran is a nuclear threat” speeches. There was renewed talk about impeachment. KO gave an impassioned special message about W.s lies.The press began to celebrate the end of
Iran as a topic of public debate.
They forgot that Cheney is like the Terminator. He never, ever stops.
What happened next should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the Bush family. Whenever a member of that self aggrandized clan is threatened in the eyes of public opinion by the fire of a scandal, another fire always springs up. The second fire is flashier and makes more smoke. It touches the Bush clan, but in a more peripheral way. The focal point of the scandal---the target, as it were---is generally some well chosen scapegoat or sometimes it is a war or a dramatic shift in public policy or a wild rumor or a federal prosecution of a high profile figure. If damning information must be revealed, it can be timed to coincide with something so big that it will be ignored by the public. The result--- everyone, the public and the press are required to turn their eyes from whatever the Bush family member wants ignored in order to stare at the bonfire which has been created expressly for their entertainment.
I illustrated this pr strategy at my cartoon website, Grand Theft Election Ohio.
Smoke Got In Their Eyes Everyone who follows the Bush family should familiarize themselves with this tactic. Papa Bush uses it. Rove uses it. Cheney uses it.
http://www.grandtheftelectionohio.com/060127.htmNow, I want to ask a basic question.
How did a story about something that happened in 2005 suddenly become front page news, right when Bush and Cheney needed a media distraction the most? And why this story, which puts the credibility of the agency which threatens Bush-Cheney credibility on the line? http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/washington/07intel.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin The New York Times informed the intelligence agency on Wednesday evening that it was preparing to publish an article about the destruction of the tapes. In his statement to employees on Thursday, General Hayden said that the agency had acted “in line with the law” and that he was informing C.I.A. employees “because the press has learned” about the matter.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7132000.stm The New York Times, which broke the story, quotes current and former government officials as saying the CIA destroyed the tapes in 2005 as it faced Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention programme.
Could the NYT source be the same source as the one that talked to CBS?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/12/06/terror/main3586578.shtml A well informed source tells CBS News the videotapes of U.S. interrogations of two high level al Qaeda operatives were destroyed to protect CIA officers from criminal prosecution, reports CBS News national security correspondent David Martin.
CBS, as we all know by now, is owned by Viacom, which has been doing the White House’s bidding since well before 2004, when it media lynched Dan Rather in order to preserve its precious TV holdings.
I don’t know about you, but
I would love to know the identity of the current and former government officials who chose to tell CBS and the NYTs right now that the CIA destroyed its torture tapes back in 2005. While the NYT story is not written by Michael Gordon, the human voice activated tape recorder who is so fond of blindly repeating whatever lies the administration has to make about Iran, we have all witnessed that newspaper’s obsession with provoking US-Iranian hostilities. The NIE must have come as quite a blow. The NYTs loves to play politics.
Did someone at the paper arrange to run this story in order to force the CIA to admit that they had destroyed the torture tapes? This would accomplish two very important things. First, it would take the immediate heat off Cheney and Bush. As we are witnessing, Congressional Dems are now exclaiming “Obstruction of Justice!” With visions of Watergate dancing in their heads, they are demanding investigations, special prosecutors, the works. All talk of investigating Bush and Cheney lies have been put on the back burner. It is one thing to lie. It is quite another to destroy a tape.
And then there is this part to make the Democrats sit up and take special notice:
http://wcco.com/national/cia.videotapes.destroyed.2.606700.html At least one White House official, then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers, knew about the CIA's planned destruction of videotapes in 2005 that documented the interrogation of two al Qaeda operatives, ABC news reported Friday. Three officials told ABC News that Miers urged the CIA not to destroy the tapes. White House officials declined to comment on the report.
That crumb might have been tossed out to lend some hope that the tape destruction might possibly be tied to the White House. Of course, later it would be revealed that she was the only WH official ever consulted, and all she did was tell them “No” as any good lawyer should.
Oh, and look, Congress is implicated, at least after the fact.
The Senate Intelligence Committee did not learn of the tapes' destruction until November 2006, and Chairman Jay Rockefeller, who then was the ranking minority member on the committee, said he was not told in 2003 of the plan to destroy them. The House Intelligence Committee learned of the tapes' destruction in March 2007.
This scandal is sort of muddy. Not all nice and clear like
“Bush Lied About Iran”.I can already tell you how this one will play out. Because I have seen it all before. Someone or a couple of someones at the CIA will be thrown under the bus. Maybe this man. Bonus points to the White House for finding someone with an Hispanic surname.
The decision to destroy the tapes was made by Jose Rodriguez, then the head of the CIA's clandestine directorate of operations under CIA Director Porter Goss.
The White House will be exonerated. The left wing bloggo-sphere will be convinced that Bush-Cheney got away with another crime, but what can you do? It must be the fault of the wimpy Democratic Congress.
Congress will be pilloried in the press for knowing about it a year ago, but not doing anything about it. (By “not doing anything about it”, the press means not holding a loaded gun to the head of a NYT editor and forcing him to run the story before he felt like running it.) So,
the public will be left with the impression that politics is a dirty, sordid business, and that Democrats are as corrupt as Republicans---which is exactly what the GOP wants Americans to believe. This fosters voter apathy, which makes people turn off the news and stay home on election day. Low turn out favors the Republican Party, since their base
always votes.
And now, for
the second and most important reason why the NYT and the White House wanted this two year old story broken now. If the CIA is discredited in public as a criminal enterprise, then the Republicans will be able to call the recent NIE a bunch of lies. Americans tend to see things in black and white. Early this week, Bush was a villain and the intelligence community was the hero. Now, the CIA is the bad guy. The press will be free to portray the CIA as a bunch of lawless rogues who do whatever the hell they please, based upon this one episode---and with their character reduced to an oil smear on the information highway, it will be oh so easy for the Republicans to convince at least their own base and a handful of Independents that you can not trust anything those spies do, even their intelligence estimates of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
I do not know that Cheney is behind this story. It is possible that it comes from someone else in the White House. It is also possible that someone in Congress tried to interest the NYTs in the story a year ago, and the newspaper of record yawned over it---until they felt a need to discredit the CIA in order to help the White House in its push to war with Iran. It is even possible that the source come from within the CIA. That organization loves Papa Bush to death. Seeing his son threatened with impeachment and with public humiliation by the press, he may have called in favors from friends in the CIA and had them leak the story.
The reason I suspect Cheney is because the story benefits him more than anyone else. Also, there is someone in the White House who has a predilection for “two-fer” dirty tricks. An example was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon which was timed to occur on the last possible day when Valerie Plame could file her civil suit against Cheney. That invasion spared Cheney a lot of bad press, since it wiped her suit off the front page. It also was an attempt to draw Iran into a war with Israel, which might have allowed the US to finally engage that country in a war. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was planned six months in advance, and the US knew about it in advance, which would have allowed Cheney to help coordinate the invasion date.
I know that Bush isn’t smart enough to be Mr. Two-fer, but Cheney certainly is.
The moral is, we all have plenty of outrage to go around. Spend some of it on torture and obstruction of justice by the CIA, but
do not forget the NIE , Iran and the latest Bush, Cheney lies. Or else, three months from now, you will find that the press has concluded that the latest NIE is a bunch of biased hooey written by a criminal organization, Iran is sitting on nukes, and we need to invade in March, before it gets too hot.
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