Even If Robin Wright Ignores It, White House Is Readying The Next Diversion Campaigns Into Iran And Syria

by Steve

If you want a textbook example of how lazy and overrated some reporters are, and how our media can be willing assistants to the Administration in leading us into another war without learning anything from Iraq, check this out.

Here we go again. The White House is ginning up the rhetoric over Syria by using once again a senior government official who wishes to remain anonymous (someone inside the White House) to claim that the Syrians have hit lists of Lebanese politicians to be assassinated. Yet Steven Weisman of the Times reports that the intelligence community hasn’t even seen this information and hasn’t even had the chance to verify it.

Note that the Post’s grossly overrated Robin Wright swallowed the administration spin on this fully without checking like the Times did to find that no one in the Administration had even seen this allegedly “credible” intelligence. So are we seeing once again the Defense Department and the White House manufacture intelligence in the ramp up to a 2006 midterm election diversion into Syria? Haven’t we been here before, and where the hell is John Negroponte in all of this?

The administration official volunteered the information about what he said was a "Syrian hit list" on the condition that he not be identified by name or agency. A spokesman for the official, asked why the official would not make the assertions more openly, said it was because of the diplomatic sensitivities involved as well as the usual reluctance to discuss intelligence matters openly.

But intelligence officials said they could not immediately substantiate the reliability of the information cited by the administration official. A State Department official said that word of a "hit list" had been "circulating among the Lebanese" but that no one in the administration had actually seen such a list and that its existence could not be independently verified.

In addition, GOP representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania claims in a new book that Iran is harboring Osama Bin Laden and is training terrorists to attack us, yet the intelligence community has already discredited Weldon’s source “Ali”, who sounds more and more like another Chalabi “Curveball” nutcase. But another Post reporter, Dana Priest, who unlike Robin Wright can actually see the spin and lies ahead of time, pulls no punches.

These secrets, he says, come from "an impeccable clandestine source," whom Weldon code-names "Ali," an Iranian exile living in Paris who is a close associate of Manucher Gorbanifar. Gorbanifar is a well-known Iranian exile whom the CIA branded as a fabricator during the 1980s but who was used by the Reagan White House as a middleman for the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran.

Switch Iran for Iraq, and Gorbanifar for Ahmed Chalabi -- an Iraqi exile whose claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were distrusted by the CIA but were embraced by the Defense Department and the White House -- and Weldon's book reads like the conservative argument for the invasion of Iraq.

Get ready for another diversion into Iran and Syria between now and the 2006 elections.

And perhaps someone can clue Robin Wright in to what is going on. Maybe she can call Weisman and find out how to check with the intelligence community first before simply doing stenography and reporting what Condi said on "Charlie Rose".