The N.I.E. Mystery-Riddle-Enigma

Yesterday's news about Iran's nuclear weapons or, more accurately, lack thereof is an event that recalls Winston Churchill's description of the Soviet Union as a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.

Even by Bush Administration standards of incompetence, illogic and intrigue, there is no sane explanation for the President's continuing public insistence that Iran come clean about weapons that his National Security Adviser now admits Bush has known for "months" do not exist.

Unless...

Going back to the 2003 Cheney gang massaging of intelligence about Iraq's WMDs that prompted Colin Powell to mislead the UN, the questions arise (1) Is Stephen Hadley trying to hide the fact that Bush was being similarly duped or (2) Did the desire for another invasion lead Bush and Cheney once again to hide evidence that would destroy the rationale for doing it until the intelligence agencies themselves finally rebelled against doing another George Tenet?

There are other, less likely possibilities. Did Congressional overseers threaten to blow the whistle (they deny it)? Did somebody finally wise up to the fact that the murky exile-terrorist group, Mujahedeen-e-Khalq or MEK, credited with "helping expose Iran’s secret nuclear program,” has been no more reliable than Ahmed Chalabi's grifters were in Iraq?

As conservatives scramble to explain that Iran stopped trying to produce nuclear weapons in 2003 because they were terrified by our invasion of Iraq (the most Hail Mary of passes in a gone game), the maddening opaqueness of what happened this week to derail Bush's milk run to World War III remains a 21st century mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.

Fourteen months from now, maybe we can give up playing these heart-stopping Neo-Con games and start living again in a sane world.

Pulling the Curtain on CIA Wizard of Oz Act

Three months ago, it looked as if he had made a clean getaway. George Tenet had his Medal of Freedom, a $4 million book advance and was all over TV complaining that his “slam dunk” recommendation on invading Iraq had been distorted. He was in Bureaucrat Heaven.

But now, thanks to both Democratic and Republican leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee with no resistance from the Bush White House, Tenet gets his comeuppance from the newly released summary of a 2005 CIA report that shreds his claims of pre-9/11 competence.

“The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” the report found, citing “failures to implement and manage important processes, to follow through with operations and to properly share and analyze critical data.”

This is a scathing indictment from an agency that never airs its dirty linen or even admits there is any. Tenet, of course, issued an instant denial, but his escape act that relied on CIA secrecy has been exposed for all to see.

The bottom line is that even the best-run intelligence agency could probably not have averted 9/11. But it’s satisfying to have confirmation that Tenet’s pitiful performance then was on a par with his failure to blow the whistle on Bush’s Neo-Cons when they distorted intelligence to justify invading Iraq the following year.

Washington schadenfreude is alive and well and, in this case, performing a public service.