It's Iraq all over again. Bush and Cheney just lied to us, again, about yet another country's irrefutable quest for weapons of mass destruction.
A classified draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House, a top US investigative reporter has said....And as an added bonus, Cheney now says he's willing to break the law in order to declare war on Iran.
But the administration's planning of a military option was made "far more complicated" in recent months by a highly classified draft assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency "challenging the White House's assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb," he wrote.
"The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency," Hersh wrote, adding the CIA had declined to comment on that story.
A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the CIA analysis and said the White House had been hostile to it, he wrote.
A month before the November 7 legislative elections, Hersh wrote, Vice President Dick Cheney attended a national-security discussion that touched on the impact of Democratic victory in both chambers on Iran policy.Republicans don't obey the law. They don't obey the will of the people. They do what they want to, to hell with what's right, to hell with the law, to hell with what the people want.
"If the Democrats won on November 7th, the vice president said, that victory would not stop the administration from pursuing a military option with Iran," Hersh wrote, citing a source familiar with the discussion.
Cheney said the White House would circumvent any legislative restrictions "and thus stop Congress from getting in its way," he said.
