Imperial Presidency In Secret, Part I

I'm watching Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner tell an oblivious Wolf Blitzer that we are already conducting military operations inside Iran. Blitzer literally cannot process this information. "But the President said he wants diplomacy to work! He wouldn't just lie about something like war! Would he? WOULD HE?" Gardiner is very calmly laying out the facts. There are intelligence-gathering operations inside Iran right now, going back 18 months. And there are preparations between dissident groups and US logistical forces to plan for a Phase II strike.

This is so completely obvious, and Blitzer is just stammering trying to push down the truth and making sure it doesn't escape.

BLITZER: Preparing intelligence, that’s understandable using all sorts of means. They want to know what the Iranians are up to in terms of their nuclear program. But are you suggesting that U.S. military forces, special operations forces, or others are on the ground right now in Iran.

GARDINER: Yes, sir. Certainly. Absolutely clear the evidence is overwhelming from lots of sources, and, again, most of them you can read in the public. Seymour Hersh has done good work on it. There are lots of other people who have done that. I have talked to Iranians. I asked an Iranian ambassador to the IAEA, what’s this I hear about Americans being there? He said to me, well, we’ve captured some people who worked with them. We’ve confirmed that they’re there.

These kind of black ops were SOP to George W. Bush's political hero Ronald Reagan. This should not be a surprise. Ask Chile. Or Guatemala. Or Angola. Or Nicaragua. Or about 10 other countries. And there are always the brazen denials of "we want to negotiate" while we engage in preliminary stages of an invasion using proxy armies (remember when Hezbollah was called an Iranian proxy, and how horrible that was? Who are these dissident groups?).

Add to the list of non-surprises: cooked intel:

Agency and the State Department said they're concerned that the offices of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney may be receiving a stream of questionable information that originates with Iranian exiles, including a discredited arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, who played a role in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal.
Officials at all three agencies said they suspect that the dubious information may include claims that Iran directed Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, to kidnap two Israeli soldiers in July; that Iran's nuclear program is moving faster than generally believed; and that the Iranian people are eager to join foreign efforts to overthrow their theocratic rulers.

The officials said there is no reliable intelligence to support any of those assertions and some that contradicts all three.

The officials said they fear a replay of the administration's mishandling of what turned out to be bogus information from Iraqi exiles in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, documented earlier this month in a Senate intelligence committee report.

Indeed, the IAEA has called a House Intelligence Committee report on Iran "dishonest", a report that makes completely false claims about how close the country is to making a nuclear weapon. Completely false charges, ay? Sounds familiar.

I think what the Administration learned about Iraq is that you just don't be so out in the open with the lies and hyping and warmongering. You just go ahead and do exactly what you want under cover of darkness.