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Banned
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by roachboy
i have to say that beyond maybe some pr for the bush tour of the region, i really dont understand what lay behind this.
it's just so strange...
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I am confident that the news reporting I have posted makes it plain that the white house, as part of it's plan to have the president preach, in every M.E. venue he was able to, in his upcoming trip, this message:
Quote:
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...8v-PuapwbQmV6g
Bush heads to Egypt on last stop of Mideast trip
17 hours ago
....The lightning visit comes at the end of a tour which has seen the US president try to drum up Arab support for the revived peace process as well as Washington's face-off with Iran......
.....But Bush faced difficulty in convincing his Saudi hosts to wholeheartedly support the twin pillars of his Middle East tour -- greater backing from Arab states for the revived Middle East peace process and a willingness to confront the "threat" of Iran.....
.....Faisal, speaking through an interpreter, also said Saudi Arabia had "nothing bad" against its powerful neighbour Iran.
"Iran is a neighbouring country, an important country in the region. Naturally we have nothing bad against Iran."
Saudi Arabia, like other Gulf states, is determined to avoid further conflict in the region after the US-led invasion of Iraq of 2003.
Earlier, Bush told journalists in Riyadh he had asked King Abdullah and other Gulf leaders to do more to "pressure" Iran over its nuclear programme.
"They need to help. They need to make it clear to nations that do business with Iran that if we want to solve this diplomatically, there needs to be pressure on the regime ... the hope is that somebody shows up and says, 'we're tired of being isolated and we're tired of the economic deprivation that comes with our desire to enrich.'"
Sweetening Bush's visit to Riyadh, the State Department announced that his administration has notified Congress of its intention to sell 900 satellite-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia for 120 million dollars.
The weapons are the first part of a planned 20-billion-dollar deal with the Gulf announced in July, and the notification begins a 30-day period for Congress to raise objections......
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Quote:
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...qvNXfi9csfK97A
Bush takes distance from key Iran findings
8 hours ago
RIYADH (AFP) — US President George W. Bush on Tuesday appeared to distance himself from what he called an "independent" US intelligence finding widely seen as dousing the likelihood of armed confrontation with Iran.
"I just made it clear that all options are on the table, but I'd like to solve this diplomatically -- and think we can," Bush, in Saudi Arabia as part of a week-long Middle East trip, said of talks with Saudi King Abdullah.
The US president said he told his host he still viewed Iran as "a threat" despite last month's US National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Tehran had shelved its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
The NIE, the consensus finding of all 16 US spy agencies, undermined the Bush administration's claim that the Islamic republic was actively seeking to get an atomic arsenal -- though it also noted that Tehran has refused to suspend uranium enrichment, which can be a key step in that direction.
"I defended our intelligence services, but made it clear that they're an independent agency; that they come to conclusions separate from what I may or may not want," said the president.
Bush said he had also told the king that the Iranians "were a threat, they are a threat, and they will be a threat if we don't work together to stop their enrichment."
Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal however avoided any forceful criticism of Iran when asked by a journalist if he considered the country a threat, as Bush said it was.
"Iran is a neighboring country and important in the region," he said. They had nothing against the country but hoped that Tehran responded to UN calls for it to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran should avoid escalating its dispute with the UN and the IAEA, he added. "It's not in its interests."
Citing an anonymous senior US administration official, Newsweek magazine reported Monday that Bush had all but disowned the NIE in talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
"He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that (the NIE's) conclusions don't reflect his own views" about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, the weekly quoted the official as saying.
Asked whether Bush doubted the findings, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino did not answer directly, saying instead that the president had "complete confidence in the intelligence community."
"He does not believe that the NIE that was produced ... should provide anyone any comfort that Iran is not a threat," she told reporters.
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These are the guys who started an unnecesary and avoidable war in Iraq that happened because they refused to accept US intelligence findings that they disagreed with.
Bush went to the M.E. with his reliability and veracity in tatters, after the ridiculously changing justification for war and entrenched occupation in Iraq, and disclosures that the NIE debunking an active Iranian nuclear weapons program was rejected and hidden for at least a year before it's forced release two months ago.
Routine encounters between US and Iranian navies in the straits of Hormuz, not anywhere near as tense as unreleased accounts encounters last month, were hyped as a serious threat to US Navy vesselslast week, on the eve of Bush's "mission" to sabotage the findings of the NIE produced by the reorganized US intelligence apparatus that Bush himself has reorganized and appointed new leadership of, as Bush comically and pathetically attempts to bleat the same message of Iran's imminent threat to the region and the rest of the world, that he has repeated so many times in the past two years.
Quote:
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/wor...html?id=236074
U.S. option to bomb Iran still on the table
Bush gives Israel hope of military action
Matthew Fisher, National Post
Published: Monday, January 14, 2008
JERUSALEM -Nobody actually said very much but Israeli officials seemed happy with how talks about Iran went here last week with U.S. President George W. Bush.
Sallai Meridor, Israel's ambassador to the United States, who came home for the President's visit, said that Israel and the Bush White House were "in sync" about the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. All options, including a military strike, remained on the table, he said, despite a recent National Intelligence Estimate prepared by an alphabet soup of U.S. intelligence agencies that concluded Iran no longer had a nuclear weapons program and had not had one since 2003.....
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Quote:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article....html?mod=blog
U-TURN
In Iran Reversal, Bureaucrats
Triumphed Over Cheney Team
Rivalries Behind Iraq War
Play Out in Risk Report;
Bush Issues New Warning
By JAY SOLOMON and SIOBHAN GORMAN
January 14, 2008; Page A1
.....In the case of the Iran report, the about-face was made possible in part by a 2004 restructuring <h3>that gave intelligence chiefs more autonomy. New procedures for vetting and authenticating reports also helped insulate analysts from White House involvement......</h3>
.......Yesterday, in Abu Dhabi, Mr. Bush sought to rally Arab states against Tehran, saying in a speech: "Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere."
The United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, meanwhile, announced in Vienna yesterday that Iran had agreed to a new road map to resolve "all remaining verification issues" concerning its nuclear program within the next month.
The Iran intelligence report "really confused many people in the Gulf," says Bruce Riedel, a former Middle East expert at the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council. "No one could understand what the hell we were doing."
Senior officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the umbrella organization that coordinates the U.S.'s 16 spy agencies and that oversaw the report, say payback wasn't a factor. They defend the report as a righting of the ship after the Iraq intelligence failures.
Sources Vetted
Hundreds of officials were involved and thousands of documents were drawn upon in this report, according to the DNI, making it impossible for any official to overly sway it. Intelligence sources were vetted and questioned in ways they weren't ahead of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Thomas Fingar, 62 years old, is one of the lead architects of the Iran report. A veteran State Department official, Mr. Fingar helped lead the office that argued in 2002 that evidence of Iraq's nuclear program was faulty. He is now a senior official at the DNI.
Of the backlash against the report, Mr. Fingar says, "A lot of it is just nonsense. The idea that this thing was written by a bunch of nonprofessional renegades or refugees is just silly."......
......Another significant change, Mr. Fingar says, has been reevaluating "our judgments and the sourcing used in previous estimates," rather than just trusting the conclusions of the old intelligence reports.
Mr. Van Diepen, as a co-author of the Iran report, drew on thousands of documents and sources in writing the final estimate and cooperated closely with 20 other officials in the last stages, say people involved in the process. Representatives from all 16 spy agencies ultimately had to sign off on this final version. Outside experts, who were expected to challenge its conclusions, were given a day to analyze the report for flaws.
The result was that the White House was essentially locked out of the process. This marked a big change from the years leading up to the Iraq war, when Mr. Cheney and his top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, made repeated visits to Langley to query analysts about their findings on Iraq's weapons capabilities.
Through the summer and fall of 2007, as rumors leaked, officials in Mr. Cheney's office and on Capitol Hill grew increasingly concerned about the report's possible conclusions, according to people working at the White House and on Capitol Hill. White House and DNI officials say President Bush first got notice from DNI chief Mike McConnell in August that significant new intelligence had emerged on Iran.
DNI officials met with White House staff a week before the report's release to go over the sources behind their assessment. Intelligence officials involved in this process say it wasn't a forum to invite changes.
Knowing the report would probably leak, <h3>and given the importance of its conclusions, the White House decided to make public the main conclusions. Most of the report is still classified.</h3>
People in Vice President Cheney's office saw the Dec. 3 announcement as a death blow to their Iran policy. The report's authors "knew how to pull the rug out from under us," says a long-time aide to the vice president, referring to the way the key judgments were presented.
Few publicly question the underlying intelligence behind the report. But a number of critics are challenging the analysts' conclusions. Some counterproliferation experts and diplomats see Iran's efforts to develop a nuclear-fuel cycle as a more important assessment than the revelation that Tehran stopped seeking to develop actual weapons. They say once the fuel cycle is accomplished, weapons can be developed in a matter of months.
"The elephant that's in the room is being ignored," says Rep. Brad Sherman of California, the Democratic chairman of a House subcommittee on proliferation issues.
"You couldn't read the key judgments [of the report] and not assume that this was intended to change policy," says Mr. Bolton. "It shredded the Bush administration policy."
<h3>Mr. Fingar warns against judging the whole report based on the two-and-a-half pages that were declassified. He says it is more than 140 pages long and has nearly 1,500 source notes.</h3>
As for Mr. Bolton's critique, "it didn't say what he wanted it to say, I guess," Mr. Fingar says.
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The "adults" are slowly taking charge again, because it is too late in the game to restaff key offices in the white house and state dept. with neocons, and the "incident" reported by the DOD last week between US naval vessels and Iranian navy patrol boats is some flatulance emitted by a totally discredited preseidential administration, as it lashed out fitfully against one of the triad of it's "axis of evil".
Pathetic, but not puzzling....... |