Kept in the Dark, Until Bombs Light Up the Sky

Courtesy of Scott Horton, we have a notable excerpt from an article by former CIA officer, Philip Giraldi, about a new NIE on Iran:

The United States government’s intelligence community has prepared a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, but the White House has decided that it is not "finished" yet and has decided to postpone any decision on issuing it until after the November elections. NIEs are the government’s document of record on international issues that confront the United States and they are supposed to be both impartial and definitive. Vice President Cheney’s office has reportedly objected to many of the conclusions in the draft Iran NIE, or, more to the point, to the lack of any conclusions that he would welcome.

The draft document indicates that there is no solid intelligence confirming that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, contradicting many recent statements made by the Administration. It also states that Iran exercised virtually no control over Hezbollah in the recent fighting in Lebanon and that there is little to no confirmed information supporting the often cited contention that Iran is arming the militias and insurgents in neighboring Iraq. The report ruefully observes that there are plenty of weapons floating around inside Iraq without any assistance from Iran, though it does note, without hard evidence, that Iran could have provided some bomb making expertise and possibly sophisticated timers and detonators to the insurgency’s arsenal. For what it’s worth, most US intelligence officers working on Iran believe that Tehran is concealing a weapons program even if the hard evidence is lacking.

I understand that people like certain pieces of music a lot. But it's extremely annoying when they keep playing them over and over and over...

I'm also not too crazy about the dropping-bombs-on-countries-that-don't-threaten-us part, especially when they might be nuclear bombs. (See Our Date with Armageddon on these issues, as well.)

As Scott notes, it would be nice to know what's in the NIE before the elections, and before the next war. Ah, well. Scott also has an excerpt from Giraldi's article about Hoaxter Hoekstra's recent visit with one of Ghorbanifar's go-betweens. Lordy, even tunes from the 1980s, and rotten ones at that.