To me, the best thing about this story is that the Defense Department's reaction to the news that American counterintelligence operatives were concerned that Pentagon officials were being manipulated by Iranian intelligence was to shut the investigation down. Because, hey, that's not the sort of thing you'd want more details on.
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Bush Administration Tools of Iranian Intelligence
06 Jun 2008 09:10 am
Comments (10)
During the Rome meetings, Ghorbanifar also laid out a scheme to overthrow the Iranian regime on a napkin during a late night meeting in a bar. "The plan," said the Senate committee, "involved the simultaneous disruption of traffic at key intersections leading to Tehran that would create anxiety, work stoppages and other disruptive measures" in a capital city famous for its traffic congestion.
And then they'll egg the Ayatollah's car and TP his house.
The Circle of Life: Geopolitics Edition
A nation starts out small and relatively powerless. Because it is weak, it can't afford any mistakes, so it watches its chances carefully, and takes advantage of bigger nations grown complacent with power. Its intelligent behavior does so well for it that soon it is big and powerful. But being big and powerful makes it gradually lose the habit of disciplining its behavior to a rigidly realistic view of the world. Its power gives it the luxury of indulging its self-flattering fantasies about itself, and it wallows more and more in such delusions. The behavior dictated by these delusions leads to disaster after disaster, and the delusions themselves make it the easy mark of smaller, leaner nations which cannot, yet, afford self-delusion. The once-great and powerful nation is soon small and weak again.
This Iranian group was able to take the administration for a ride, not because Iran has some sort of magic or diabolical espionage skills, but because we have reached the stage in the above cycle of power where we are easy marks for a con. Our peculiar delusions are well known in a world that, quite reasonably, carefully studies the thinking of the world's only superpower. And these delusions are easy to exploit.
Sadly, the stupidity engendered by excessive power is not confined to this administration. Dubya may indeed be the most extremely stupid and delusional person to ever be US president. But his election, and especially re-election after 4 years of the evidence of his delusional stupidity, make it quite clear that among the US electorate, stupid and delusional, especially as regards foreign policy, sells. No doubt Obama and the Democrats in general are much less inclined to delusional stupidity than Dubya. But what our side seems to think polticially expedient to say about Iran is still plenty stupid and delusional. The explanation that we are only constrained to say dumb things about Iran because we have to please the electorate is a statement of the real problem, not a reassuring excuse.
Are we bound to a wheel of fate that will drag us inexorably down? Of course not. A nation can accept the lessons that reality teaches about its delusions at any point in the downward swing. But what enforces the cyclical nature of this process is that power insulates the nation that wields it from the teaching consequences until the power has been squandered by the folly of acting on the delusions. The consequences haven't come back to us, yet, so it would take forethought and imagination to shake the electorate from its complacent trust in the comforting delusions. But that is actually a hopeful perspective. We've only suffered 4,000 casualties (which is less than a month's worth of the human toll we regularly sacrifice to tobacco and indulgent traffic laws without a second thought), and yet there are defintie signs that the electorate would be willing to take a lesson from even that. It remains to be seen if any of our politicos will have the will, the daring, and the imagination to follow up on that willingness to reverse course before we have hit bottom and are forced to reverse course.
Walcott / McClatchy: The first meetings with Ghorbanifar... took place in Rome in December 2001. They were attended by two Pentagon Iran experts, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin; by an Italian military intelligence official, and by [Michael] Ledeen.
It's worth remembering the role Italy's intelligence agency, SISMI, played in passing forged documents regarding Iraq purchasing Yellowcake uranium from Niger to the Cheney / Bush 'administration' in 2002.
In fact, the December, 2001 meeting with Ghorbanifar was not only attended by Rhode, Franklin and Ledeen, but the "Italian military intelligence official" Walcott mentions was Nicolo Pollari, the head of SISMI; another attendee was the Italian Minister of Defense, Antonio Martino.
In late 2002, Pollari travelled to Washington for a meeting with [then] NSC Director Rice's deputy Stephen Hadley, to vouch for the genuineness of the Niger documents.
The connections between SISMI and the Cheney / Bush 'administration' in the run-up to the Iraq invasion were well-reported by Josh Marshall, Laura Rozen and Paul Glastris in a September, 2004 article for Washington Monthly.
In 2003, Pollari assisted the CIA in kidnapping Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, reportedly one of the agency's own assets, in Milan; Nasr was 'renditioned' to Egypt and probably tortured. 26 Americans were tried in absentia for the abduction, and Pollari removed from his position as chief of SISMI -- but remained a 'counsellor' in the Berlusconi government.
If we can't see them, they can't see us right?
"During the Rome meetings, Ghorbanifar also laid out a scheme to overthrow the Iranian regime on a napkin during a late night meeting in a bar. "The plan," said the Senate committee, "involved the simultaneous disruption of traffic at key intersections leading to Tehran that would create anxiety, work stoppages and other disruptive measures" in a capital city famous for its traffic congestion."
This does sound very stupid and would probably require assassinations to work. Then again, traffic congestion in Lagos contributed to the successful killing of a former Nigerian head of state when gunmen came up to his car, the driver had no room to maneuver in because of Lagos's notoriously bad traffic and then the gunmen opened fire. However, this does sound just a step above exploding cigars and foot powder used to try and kill Castro.
By any chance, is this the same Ghorbanifar who hoodwinked the Reagan administration? The one who Oliver North once threatened with termination with extreme prejudice.
Manucher Ghorbanifer
Is what he's called in the news reports, which is the same name as the Iran Contra figure. Unless Manucher and Ghorbanifer are names as common as John and Smith in English, I'm guessing it's the same person. Or perhaps his son. Two generations playing off American idiots...
Re Glen Tomkins
"Two generations playing off American idiots.."
Considering the number of morons who fell for Chalabi, what else is new?
The notion that Iran tricked the US into invading Iraq and deposing Saddam is a joke.
The whole thing was a neocon/Israeli scam - like pretty much everything else that's gone down in the last eight years, including 9/11.
Comments closed June 20, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
I think by now we all should realize that the Bush administration's favorite way of dealing with problems is to ignore them and hope they go away. It's the approach he used with global warming, the Iraqi insurgency, Hurricane Katrina, etc.
Posted by Killjoy | June 6, 2008 9:36 AM