Guess What?

The Bush Administration is deceiving the public about the weapons program of a Middle Eastern country with "I-R-A" as the first three letters of their name! Stop me if you've heard this one.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A classifed draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House, a top US investigative reporter has said.

Seymour Hersh, writing in an article for the November 27 issue of the magazine The New Yorker released in advance, reported on whether the administration of Republican President George W. Bush was more, or less, inclined to attack Iran after Democrats won control of Congress last week

A month before the November 7 legislative elections, Hersh wrote, Vice President Dick Cheney attended a national-security discussion that touched on the impact of Democratic victory in both chambers on Iran policy.

"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," Hersh wrote, citing a source familiar with the discussion [...]

But the administration's planning of a military option was made "far more complicated" in recent months by a highly classified draft assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency "challenging the White House's assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb," he wrote.

"The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running paallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency," Hersh wrote, adding the CIA had declined to comment on that story.

A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the CIA analysis and said the White House had been hostile to it, he wrote.

Of course, the CIA's been wrong before. And Iran isn't to be fully trusted. But clearly, dumbasses like Joshua Muravchik, who think the only answer to an undefined nuclear energy program in Tehran is to cause a global economic meltdown by bombing it into the Stone Age, should not even be dignified with a response. We have no verification about the extent of this program, and I personally have no faith that those tasked to carry out any response have the intelligence and competency to pull it off. So put the missiles and battleships away.

Instead of stamping your little feet because the intelligence doesn't give you the pretext you need to attack, how about pushing for better intelligence to verify the nature of the threat and backing up your own statements? I hope Harry Reid returns to the Iran Intelligence Oversight Act in January. We can't have this kind of deliberate deception again.