Hard Rain Journal 11-20-06: The USA Needs A Scapegoat, I Suggest the Bush-Cheney National Insecurity Team
The USA needs to accept the fact of another failed regime -- this one at home. The USA needs somewhere to affix the blame. The USA needs to point the finger, not outwardly, but inwardly. The USA needs a scapegoat, and I suggest the Bush-Cheney national insecurity team.
The US political establishment needs to distance itself quickly from a series of national security debacles, including the Mega-Mogadishu in Iraq, the failure to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the arrogant disregard of the Geneva Accords and the disasterous policy of Malign Neglect in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The only way to do this is to unleash congressional investigations and either bring down Bush-Cheney constitutionally via impeachment or politically via resignations. The evidence already exists in open source. Certainly, the leadership has access to even more.
I do not know if Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi will blink (well, I doubt she would). But they cannot afford to let the Bush-Cheney regime off the mat politically or criminally. They must finish this...
The most likely scenario is to force the resignation of Cheney and Rove through the pursuit of various investigations, which would force the completion of Poppy's makeover of this administration (i.e., Robert Gates, the Iraq Working Group, etc.) and leave George W. Bush under what would amount to an unspoken White House arrest (and little more than a legend in his own mind) for the last two years of his second (and final) term.
The priorities have to be to 1) thwart war with Iran, 2) get the new Congress sworn in (and strengthen the security of its physical and cyber perimeters) and 3) remove Cheney from office -- although not necessarily in that order.
Here are two excerpts from Sy Hersh latest expose in The New Yorker via Truthout:
Is a damaged Administration less likely to attack Iran, or more?
A month before the November elections, Vice-President Dick Cheney was sitting in on a national-security discussion at the Executive Office Building. The talk took a political turn: what if the Democrats won both the Senate and the House? How would that affect policy toward Iran, which is believed to be on the verge of becoming a nuclear power? At that point, according to someone familiar with the discussion, Cheney began reminiscing about his job as a lineman, in the early nineteen-sixties, for a power company in Wyoming. Copper wire was expensive, and the linemen were instructed to return all unused pieces three feet or longer. No one wanted to deal with the paperwork that resulted, Cheney said, so he and his colleagues found a solution: putting "shorteners" on the wire - that is, cutting it into short pieces and tossing the leftovers at the end of the workday. If the Democrats won on November 7th, the Vice-President said, that victory would not stop the Administration from pursuing a military option with Iran. The White House would put "shorteners" on any legislative restrictions, Cheney said, and thus stop Congress from getting in its way....
The Administration's planning for a military attack on Iran was made far more complicated earlier this fall by a highly classified draft assessment by the C.I.A. challenging the White House's assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb. The C.I.A. found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency. (The C.I.A. declined to comment on this story.)
The C.I.A.'s analysis, which has been circulated to other agencies for comment, was based on technical intelligence collected by overhead satellites, and on other empirical evidence, such as measurements of the radioactivity of water samples and smoke plumes from factories and power plants. Additional data have been gathered, intelligence sources told me, by high-tech (and highly classified) radioactivity-detection devices that clandestine American and Israeli agents placed near suspected nuclear-weapons facilities inside Iran in the past year or so. No significant amounts of radioactivity were found.
A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the C.I.A. analysis, and told me that the White House had been hostile to it. The White House's dismissal of the C.I.A. findings on Iran is widely known in the intelligence community. Cheney and his aides discounted the assessment, the former senior intelligence official said. "They're not looking for a smoking gun," the official added, referring to specific intelligence about Iranian nuclear planning. "They're looking for the degree of comfort level they think they need to accomplish the mission." The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency also challenged the C.I.A.'s analysis. "The D.I.A. is fighting the agency's conclusions, and disputing its approach," the former senior intelligence official said. Bush and Cheney, he added, can try to prevent the C.I.A. assessment from being incorporated into a forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iranian nuclear capabilities, "but they can't stop the agency from putting it out for comment inside the intelligence community." The C.I.A. assessment warned the White House that it would be a mistake to conclude that the failure to find a secret nuclear-weapons program in Iran merely meant that the Iranians had done a good job of hiding it. The former senior intelligence official noted that at the height of the Cold War the Soviets were equally skilled at deception and misdirection, yet the American intelligence community was readily able to unravel the details of their long-range-missile and nuclear-weapons programs. But some in the White House, including in Cheney's office, had made just such an assumption - that "the lack of evidence means they must have it," the former official said....
Seymour M. Hersh, The Next Act, The New Yorker, 11-20-06
SOME RELATED POSTS:
Hard Rain Journal 11-19-06: Courage and Clarity of Mind on Iraq and Iran -- Odom says, "We must cut and run tactically in order to succeed strategically."
Hard Rain Journal 8-31-06: Who Will You Believe About the Coming Confrontation with Iran?
Words of Power #27: Have Far from the Mooring of Reality has this Ship of Fools Drifted? The Regime & Its Enablers Look Past Iraq & Katrina to Iran
Hard Rain Journal 7-2-06: Sy Hersh Delivers More Insight on US Generals' Resistance to Bush-Cheney Eagerness for War with Iran
Words of Power #16: Lt. Gen. Newbold Bears Witness, Sy Hersh Sounds the Alarm & Patrick Fitzgerald Raises the Stakes
Words of Power #8: Odom and Wilkerson Bear Witness
Richard Power is the founder of GS(3) Intelligence and http://www.wordsofpower.net. His work focuses on the inter-related issues of security, sustainability and spirit, and how to overcome the challenges of terrorism, cyber crime, global warming, health emergencies, natural disasters, etc. You can reach him via e-mail: richardpower@wordsofpower.net. For more information, go to www.wordsofpower.net
Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Bush, Seymour Hersh, Cheney, Israel, Palestine, Al-Qaeda, CIA, The New Yorker
