Liberty Street: Not Learning from Experience

Dick Cheney is not about to let a little obstacle like a Democratic election win stop his plans to bomb Iraq:

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 White House's concern was not that the Democrats would cut off funds for the war in Iraq but that future legislation would prohibit it from financing operations targeted at overthrowing or destabilizing the Iranian government, to keep it from getting the bomb. "They're afraid that Congress is going to vote a binding resolution to stop a hit on Iran, a la Nicaragua in the Contra war," a former senior intelligence official told me.

In late 1982, Edward P. Boland, a Democratic representative, introduced the first in a series of "Boland amendments," which limited the Reagan Administration's ability to support the Contras, who were working to overthrow Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista government. The Boland restrictions led White House officials to orchestrate illegal fund-raising activities for the Contras, including the sale of American weapons, via Israel, to Iran. The result was the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-eighties. Cheney's story, according to the source, was his way of saying that, whatever a Democratic Congress might do next year to limit the President's authority, the Administration would find a way to work around it. (In response to a request for comment, the Vice-President's office said that it had no record of the discussion.)

The same Hersh article reports that the White House is stovepiping intelligence on Iran's nuclear capacity, just as it did with Iraq:

On CNN, New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh reported that a new CIA assessment concludes that "there's no evidence Iran is doing anything that puts them close to a bomb." Despite the intelligence agency's conclusion, Hersh reports that the White House is still aggressively moving ahead with preparations for a military conflict with Iran.

As part of the White House's preparations for Iran, Hersh says President Bush and Vice President Cheney are "stovepiping" intelligence and keeping information provided by the Israelis hidden from the CIA.

The Israelis are telling the White House, according to Hersh's new article "The Next Act," that they have a reliable agent inside Iran who reports that the nation is working on a trigger for a bomb. "Of course the people in the CIA want to know who [the agent] is, obviously," Hersh said. "They certainly want to know what other evidence he has of actual making of a warhead. This is the internecine fight that's going on -- the same fight, by the way, that we had before Iraq."

Prior to the Iraq war, the White House set up intelligence stovepipes to "get information they wanted directly to the top leadership." Cheney and company relied on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. "Chalabi's defector reports were ... flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President's office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals."

State Dept. intelligence expert Greg Thielmann said that prior to the Iraq war that "garbage was being shoved straight to the President." A U.S. official confirmed that defectors from Chalabi's organization "had provided suspect information to numerous Western intelligence agencies. 'It's safe to say he tried to game the system,' the official said."

Hersh's article suggests a similar breakdown in the intelligence process is happening with regards to Iran and may open t[he] door to possible intelligence manipulation.