CAUGHT IN LIES

For over a year, President Bush tried – in vain – to cover up an Iran report of the secret services. Now Teheran is exonerated

By Rainer Rupp

[This article published 12/5/2007 in: Junge Welt is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.jungewelt.de/2007/12-05/037.php?print=1.]




In 2003 Iran stopped its nuclear weapon program – condemned by the US as a threat. The long-awaited “National Intelligence Estimate” (NIE) made this assessment – a secret report summarizing the unanimous opinion of all 16 secret services. Its content was revealed on Monday. The surprising assessment of Iranian nuclear policy could have far reaching consequences. On Tuesday the New York Times commented “the last year of the Bush administration will probably be reorganized.”

With the study, President George W. Bush was actually exposed as a liar from the immediate environment of his administration. For years, the man in the White House had described Iran’s civilian use of nuclear energy as “dangerous.” Enforced international sanctions and threatened military strikes. By fomenting war hysteria, he consciously made use of misinformation – as in the preparation of the Iraq war.

On August 28, 2007 before veterans of the “American Legion,” Bush conjured the “shadows of a nuclear holocaust.” He did this though he had long known about the content of the NIE. His vice-president Richard Cheney had delayed its publication for over a year. When Bush even threatened a “third world war” on October 17 if Iran would not stop its nuclear weapons program, he tried to blackmail the world.

Bush and Cheney were massively supported by influential Zionist organizations in the US and by representatives of the neoconservative movement who had powerful positions in the two large parties of the US and by sympathetic media. At the same time the president and his representatives expressed public “understanding” for Israel attacking Iran.

Since 1995, the NIE secret service findings concluded every year that Iran would have the capacity to build nuclear weapons “within five years.” In 2005 it was said for the first time Iran would not be capable of nuclear weapons “until the beginning or middle of the next decade.” According to secret service sources, more care and less overzealous political obedience would be appropriate for the services in drawing up the NIE, especially for the CIA made the scapegoat for the propaganda debacle around the Iraq war and for the lies of the White House. The new approach of the spies increasingly annoyed the White House.

When the draft for the new NIE on Iran was presented in the fall of 2006, vice-president Cheney intervened directly and sent the version back to the authors. What he read in the first versions displeased him like the disclosure of the renowned US historian with contacts to the services, Gareth Potter, on November 9, 2007 in the Huffington Post. Nevertheless the NIE on Iran was now presented on accounted of the growing pressure in Congress. Cheney could not force the services to his will – at least not entirely. In the NIE, it says the US services did not know whether Iran intended to develop nuclear weapons.