Even Liberals Suspect Iran NIE

RUSH: It’s Open Line Friday, and this is Joanne in Queen Creek, Arizona. I never heard of that, but it sounds like a place I would love to go.

CALLER: (chuckles) Well, we’re here. Come on down!

RUSH: (laughter) I knew I could wrangle an invitation.

CALLER: Having been raised by a mother who is just a little bit to the right of the John Birch Society, I’m very conservative in my thinking, but I won’t forget history, because there is that saying about forgetting history will repeat it. But Neville Chamberlain came back with a paper signed by Hitler that says ‘peace in our time,’ and look what happened. Now we’re listening to Iran saying, ‘Oh, well, everything is okay, nothing’s really happening, we’re not doing anything,’ but people also forget that the Japanese were in Washington, DC, at a peace conference with our president when they bombed Pearl Harbor.

RUSH: Yes, that’s true. What are you saying, that the Iranians are somehow in the State Department?

CALLER: (laughter) All I’m saying is that we need to listen to what they’re saying and not take a word as truth. We need to actually figure it out for ourselves so that we’re not caught with our shorts down.

RUSH: Well, I have to tell you, there’s a lot of people that are not satisfied with this whole thing. Some conservatives in Washington want a review of Iran intelligence to be sought. ‘The move is the first official challenge, but it comes amid growing backlash from conservatives and neoconservatives,’ this is the Washington Post, of course, ‘unhappy about the assessment that Iran halted a clandestine nuclear weapons program four years ago. It reflects how quickly the NIE has become politicized, with critics even going after the analysts who wrote it, and shows a split among Republicans.’ How politicized the NIE’s become? ‘How politicized opposition to George W. Bush has become,’ is the right way to put it. If you go to the LA Times, you get a whole different take. ‘Doves Find Fault with Iran Report, Too — The new US intelligence report that says Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is suddenly raising concerns among the political center and left…

‘Moderate and liberal foreign policy experts said that US intelligence agencies, possibly eager to demonstrate independence from White House political pressure, may have produced a National Intelligence Estimate that is more reassuring than it should be on the potential risks of the Iranian nuclear program. … Gary Samore, who was a top arms control official in the Clinton White House, agreed that the National Intelligence Estimate did not adequately emphasize Iran’s continuing efforts to enrich uranium and build missiles.’ Even former Clintonistas are suspicious of this, and this whole story in the LA Times basically is quoting a bunch of liberals, who suspect that anti-Bush politics drove the NIE conclusions. All a bunch of liberals. I mean, this is shazam time. The Israelis are not happy about this, either. The Israeli Defense Forces… I guess the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is going to make a trip to Israel. They don’t go there very much. He’s going to go there.

The IDF and Mossad, are saying, ‘Okay, I don’t think they’re doing nukes. Let’s show you what we’ve got.’ The Israelis, and even the French, and even some at the UN, are saying, ‘We’re not quite this convinced on this.’ So this isn’t over. This is not over. Right now, it’s hamstrung everybody in the administration from doing anything, which I think was the intent — and there are some people, ladies and gentlemen, you know, when this kind of stuff happens, because this is a 180. Nobody is ever… In the last five years, six, nobody has said they’re not doing it. This is the first time, and so all kinds of theories are popping up. One of the theories is that this is the first step to open genuine diplomatic negotiations with Iran to make a deal, and that this is actually what the Bush administration wants so that we can lower the wall of resistance. It’s a theory I’m hearing being bandied about.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Guess what? There’s even more fallout than we knew. ‘The latest National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program four years ago has claimed…’ yet another, heh, heh, heh, ‘casualty: CNN has postponed the speculative documentary ‘We Were Warned — Iran Goes Nuclear.’ The two-hour spec, which was slated for Dec. 12 under the ‘CNN Presents’ banner, was ‘set partially in the future,’ featuring a what-if scenario as former government officials — playing fictional cabinet members — debate how to deal with the Iranian threat. That special was ‘based on a different set of rules and a different set of conditions,’ said CNN veep-senior exec producer Mark Nelson, noting that the surprising NIE report ‘changed everything.” No, it doesn’t! I can’t believe CNN’s caving on this just because of the NIE? They still could do it. They may have already ramped back up! The NIE’s not sure! Actually, it’s probably a good thing, because I would imagine that the CNN approach to this is, ‘Thank God Iran finally got nukes so that there’s a balance of power out there.’ The United States, you have Madeleine Albright, her character in there, ‘Yeah, it’s bad, it’s really bad that we’re the lone superpower here, and this will provide stability and balance in the Middle East, and it’s a good thing that Iran has finally gone nuclear.’ That probably would be her take. At the CNN that I know, that would be the angle.