Episode 21,619 of people who shouldn’t be asked to comment on anything about anything ever again.
His name is John Hannah. He’s currently a senior counselor for the right-wing Foundation for Defense of Democracies. On Tuesday, he’s slated to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about "White House Narratives on the Iran Nuclear Deal."
In a sane world, it would be surprising if this guy were called forth. Consider the fact he was one of the more prominent behind-the-scenes sources for a bogus Republican narrative on Saddam Hussein’s alleged connections to al Queda and anti-U.S. terrorism in the propaganda-filled months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But, in case you were wondering, we don’t live in a sane world.
David Corn at Mother Jones writes that the hearing where Hannah will appear came about after The New York Times published a story about White House national security aide Ben Rhodes putting together a group of experts and journalists to publicly support the Iran nuclear agreement. While Republicans claimed this misled Americans about the agreement, the White House said it was merely a “concerted effort” to get out the facts. But Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who chairs the Oversight committee, decided to hold hearings designed to show there was an Obama scandal behind getting support for the agreement. Here’s Corn:
[Hannah]'s a senior official at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconish outfit that opposed the Iran deal. But more relevant—or awkward—he's a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who was deeply involved in the Bush-Cheney administration's use of bogus intelligence to sell the Iraq War.
In 2002, as hawks and neocons were angling to launch a war against Saddam Hussein and trying to generate a case to justify an attack, Hannah, then an aide in Vice President Cheney's office, was a contact person in the White House receiving false intelligence on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi that was trying to encourage US military action against Iraq. As Knight Ridder subsequently reported, "The Bush administration relied on some of the information from the Iraqi National Congress to argue that Saddam Hussein had to be ousted before he could give banned biological or chemical weapons to al-Qaida for strikes on the United States."
Hannah was also the main defender of a first draft of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s now-infamous February 2003 speech to the United Nations designed to persuade members of the righteousness in the invasion of Iraq that was just six weeks away.
The draft of Powell’s speech that Hannah so avidly defended was eventually circular-filed, and the speech the secretary gave was based on a National Intelligence Estimate that itself turned out to be based on bad information. But the version Hannah had backed had been far worse.
Corn explains that in an interview for a 2006 book he and Michael Isikoff wrote, Powell’s chief of staff Larry Wilkerson said: "Hannah was constantly flipping through his clipboard, trying to source and verify all the statements … It was clear the thing was put together by cherry-picking everything from the New York Times to the DIA."
Democrats on the Oversight committee need only ask Hannah one question: “Why should anybody believe a single word that crawls out of your mouth?”