"Its An NIE That The VP Badly Wants To Drop Behind A Filing Cabinet" (Scott Horton)

[kpete]

The Secrecy Game
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED October 27, 2007

Michael McConnell started his first two months on the job with a solid record for candor and accuracy. He avoided political doublespeak. And then something strange happened. He became a shameless and irresponsible political propagandist.

With that background, it should come as no surprise that McConnell now plans to keep America in the dark as to the national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Iranian nuclear programs. Pam Hess of AP reports:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2007/10/intel_estimates_to_be_more_res.php

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Now we know that the NIE has been done and gathering dust for more than three months. We also know that Vice President Cheney’s office, which promptly leaks NIEs when it finds them useful, absolutely hates this NIE and has been doing everything it can think to do to put it off. Why might that be?

Sources close to the NIE tell me that it would work at cross-purposes with the Administration’s fall roll-out of its new war effort against Iran. The NIE will apparently conclude that Iran is diligently pursuing a nuclear weapons program, and that Iran is pursuing a delivery system. It will also conclude that even on the fastest possible track it is still a couple of years away from having anything meaningful. Which means this threat does not become an acute one until some time after Bush and Cheney leave office. In other words, it’s an NIE that the Vice President badly wants to drop somewhere behind a filing cabinet. And the best way to do that is to declare it’s so super secret that no one can have a copy of that particular decoder ring.

No decision is more important to a democracy than the decision whether or not to take the nation to war. Our Founding Fathers fully appreciated that. That decision making process is cheapened when the Executive arrogates to himself all the available information, claims a monopoly on it, and attempts to exclude others from the process by saying they are not privy to the information he has. Listen carefully. That gurgling is the sound of a democracy being strangled.

more at:
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/10/hbc-90001527

[TwilightGardener]

1. Bwah! How blatant, to suddenly change the rules when the NIE does not

favor the current warpath! McConnell should be ashamed--it's one thing to have been a neocon lackey in 2002, quite another to sign on in 2007, after all the people who have been thrown under the bus and proved not credible. What a dipshit. Just shows that there will always be willing volunteers for the regime.