You mean to say our government…?: Forget it, I can’t go on

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Written By Jim Moore

Sorry, I’ll have to let the newspaper speak for me today. I just don’t have the stomach to tell you this myself.  I have, after all, a few editorial parameters left.

The story, starting with this headline, “U.S. Intelligence ends up in Iran.” was reported by Warren P. Strobel and John Wolcott, for Knight Ridder Newspapers, of which our daily rag, the Tallahassee Democrat, is one.

It seems that the U.S. Government is launching another nerve-end, jump-start investigation; this time to find out how Ahmad Chalabi, a convicted embezzler and peddler of false information about Iraq’s WMDs, was able to get hold of  “highly classified and damaging” American intelligence, which is bad enough—but then it was passed on to Iran, which is about as bad as it can get.

Well, not quite. The worse part is this: con-man Ahmad Chalabi  was presumably one of “us”. That is, he was the leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a position of prestige and power, assigned to him by, yup, you guessed it, U.S. officials.

Although Chalabi was a darling of the biggies at the Pentagon for helping build support for the Iraqi war, his security chief, Arras Habib, was suspected by U.S. officials of (get this) being a longtime agent of Iran’s intelligent service.

Now, is it just me, or does anybody else think that a man suspected of ties to Iran isn’t exactly the ideal man for U.S. officials to make leader of the Iraqi National Congress?   Or, is it just that working at cross-purposes has become so routine for the U.S. Government that they no longer recognize it when they see it? Either way, one word defines it: Dumb.

And that’s just the beginning of this administration’s official idiocy.

When asked about Chalabi’s “conflict of interest”, General Myers nervously jingled his medals and opined, “I have some information. But we’d have to go to a closed hearing to talk about it.”  Right on, General. We mustn’t advertise to the American public how badly we screwed up again, must we?

The General continued: “The Iraqi National Congress has provided very good intelligence to our forces in Iraq that have prevented our soldiers from dying.”   With more dying every day, General, which soldiers did you have in mind? AND, if our intelligence is THAT good, General, how come we allowed Chalabi to head the INC, and let his aide slip hot intelligence to Iran at the same time?  If you have room left on your shoulders, Gen. Myers, you deserve another star for that brilliant report.

Furthermore, this info-bootlegger, Habib, played the U.S. officials for saps right on down the line. Not only was this cagey Arab hustler busy feeding Iran sensitive U.S. information, much of it classified “above” top secret, but his sticky fingerprints are on more than just our classified secrets.  This double-dealing dirt-bag was the one also “providing” U.S. officials with “fabricated, exaggerated, and unconfirmed” information about Iraq weapons programs that President Bush presumably used in building his case for invading Iraq

But don’t exonerate Bush just yet. This is a classic example of a president jumping off a diving board and finding no water in the pool. If being taken in by faulty information from the head of the INC (who WE put in office) is Bush’s rationale for ordering us into a senseless war, we have another double-dealer in our midst. This one lives at the White House.

One U.S. intelligence official trotted out an even scarier scenario: “The bottom line here is that much of the information the administration had about Iraq may have come from an Iranian agent. If that’s true, this is a huge scandal.”  That’s an understatement of gigantic proportions. It’s not only a huge scandal, it’s an unconscionable dereliction of duty.

Imagine that. The information we get about a potential enemy may well have been given to us by another potential enemy. And President Bush sent our men and women off to war based on THIS kind of unsubstantiated claptrap. Now THAT, in anybody’s book, is administrative stupidity, and colossal presidential incompetence.

Of course, all we’re getting from political and media talking heads about this particular scandal are reports that are kissed off with “declined to comment on any specifics” and “on conditions of anonymity.”

Well, here’s one comment on specifics from a writer who asks for no conditions of anonymity. This whole disgusting fiasco of false information, going from a suspected enemy, to a bloated, inefficient intelligence network, and finally to a bumbling, second-rate, shoot-’em-up president is the worst example I’ve ever seen of American leadership.

And the dirty shame about all this is that many people, both military and innocent civilians, are getting needlessly killed in a “war on terrorism” that makes no sense, has no end, and as such, is gradually depleting and relentlessly destroying the greatest nation on earth.

But not quite yet.  We can still save America. Here’s what our founding fathers had to say about that:

“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”—Thomas Jefferson

“The strongest reason for people to retain their right to bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against a tyrannical government.— Thomas Jefferson

“When any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to altar or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness—from the Declaration of Independence.

Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”

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