Hoekstra's Hoax .-- Ray McGovern regarding Iran Nuke scare

[Tom Joad]

Just When You Thought You'd Seen Everything: Hoekstra's Hoax
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082506R.shtml

Talk about chutzpah! I was suffering a bit from outrage fatigue yesterday but was shaken out of it as soon as I downloaded an unusually slick paper, "Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States," released this week by House intelligence committee chair, Pete Hoekstra.

No, not "Hoaxer." This is serious - very serious. The paper amounts to a pre-emptive strike on what's left of the Intelligence Community, usurping its prerogative to provide policymakers with estimates on front-burner issues - in this case, Iran's weapons of mass destruction and other threats. The Senate had already requested a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. But Hoekstra is first out of the starting gate. Professional intelligence officers were "as a courtesy" invited to provide input to Hoekstra's report.

While you can't judge a book by its cover, you can glean insight these days from the titles given to National Intelligence Estimates and papers meant to supplant them. Remember "Iraq's Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction," the infamous NIE of October 1, 2002, by which Congress was misled into approving an unnecessary war? "Continuing" leaped out of the title, foreshadowing the one-sided thrust of an estimate ostensibly commissioned to determine whether WMD programs were "continuing," or whether they had been dead for ten years. (The latter turned out to be the case, but the title - and the cooked insides - provided the scare needed to get Congress aboard.)
More at link above.
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See also this very important Washington Post article, on "U.N. Inspectors Dispute Iran Report By House Panel"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/13/AR2006091302052.html

We can't let these warmongers do this again. We must give stop promoters of war.

What we should be doing is promoting first, and foremost a nuclear-free Middle East, including Israel and Pakistan right now the only Middle East nations to possess nuclear weapons (Israel has a very large arsenal, probably fourth largest in the world). Second, we must be working on global disarmament of nuclear weapons, including of the United States and Europe.

Only then will we have any credibility. Only then will we be able to step back from the abyss.