Oh, THAT Explains It.

By Cernig

Hardline neocon pundits are getting all excited today about a suggestion by Chris Hitchens that the CIA be abolished as punishment for not delivering their war allegedly politicizing the recent Iran NIE with an anti-war bias, which apparently amounts to treason.

It's a ludicrous suggestion even for Lefties who think the CIA is, by and large, just as much a tool of the Right as any other part of the federal government after six years of Bush administration cronyism and political loyalty tests for employees. It's so not going to happen and in any case it's so not a good idea to entirely dismantle the main civilian intelligence gathering arm of the USA in favor of purely military intel.

However a little digging explains why the extreme Right are so sure that the NIE was grabbed and politicized by the anti-war lobby.

Back in September 2006, Reuters reported that the IAEA had protested an "outrageous and dishonest" congressional report which wildly distorted and politicized the Agency's actual work on the Iran file. The Agency wrote to Congress protesting that:

the report falsely described Iran to have enriched uranium at its pilot centrifuge plant to weapons-grade level in April, whereas IAEA inspectors had made clear Iran had enriched only to a low level usable for nuclear power reactor fuel.

"Furthermore, the IAEA Secretariat takes strong exception to the incorrect and misleading assertion" that the IAEA opted to remove a senior safeguards inspector for supposedly concluding the purpose of Iran's program was to build weapons, it said.

The letter said the congressional report contained "an outrageous and dishonest suggestion" that the inspector was dumped for having not adhered to an alleged IAEA policy barring its "officials from telling the whole truth" about Iran.

Diplomats say the inspector remains IAEA Iran section head.

The false report had been given a lot of attention by rightwing pundits after a Washington Post front page story said it was "a stinging critique of U.S. intelligence on Iran" and that "it chides the intelligence community for not providing enough direct evidence to support" claims from the White House that Iran still had an active nuclear weapons program.

It had been written by "Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA officer who had been a special assistant to John R. Bolton, the administration's former point man on Iran at the State Department".

The reason they're so sure the NIE was politicized is because it's what they already had done and they cannot conceive of anyone being less underhanded and dishonest than they themselves are.

Was it treason then too?