"What did they know and when did they know it?"
Well, Dick Cheney knew about the report over a year ago. That means he's known the truth about Iran and it's total lack of a weapons program for over a year.
How do we know this? Because he he has spent this last year trying to get the report changed. Yes, he's been fighting them for over a year to get that report to say what he wanted it to say. The way he did back in 2002 when he got them to lie about Iraq.
This time, he failed.
And we are left wondering: Did Iran ever have a nuclear weapons program at all?
Gareth Porter reported on November 8, for IPS News, before the report was released:
Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in Iran NIE
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 (IPS) - A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.
So Cheney knew the truth over a year ago. They all did. But what did Cheney want to do with these facts?
Why, he wanted to make it disappear, force others to lie, and rush this country into another disastrous war.
"The White House wants a document that it can use as evidence for its Iran policy," says Giraldi. Despite pressures on them to change their dissenting conclusions, however, Giraldi says some analysts have refused to go along with conclusions that they believe are not supported by the evidence.
Thank God for these analysts who stood up for the truth. Otherwise we might be on the road to World War III.
And not only did Cheney object to the findings about Iran's non-existent nuclear weapon program, he also didn't like that it found no evidence of the neo-con's accusations that Iran has supplied the insurgency in Iraq with weapons (something widely reported in the U.S. media and even repeated by Hillary Clinton):
In October 2006, Giraldi wrote in The American Conservative that the NIE on Iran had already been completed, but that Cheney's office had objected to its findings on both the Iranian nuclear programme and Iran's role in Iraq. The draft NIE did not conclude that there was confirming evidence that Iran was arming the Shiite insurgents in Iraq, according to Giraldi.
Cheney was successful with this tactic back in 2002:
The Washington Post reported in June 2003 that Cheney and his chief of staff Scooter Libby had visited CIA analysts several times in 2002 to get them to reexamine their skeptical analysis on the WMD issue. But equally important, the Post quoted a "senior agency official" as saying that speeches by Cheney in August 2002 charging Saddam with having a nuclear weapons program "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here."
The effect was achieved despite the fact that the October 2002 NIE on Iraqi WMD was done very quickly, because it had been forced on the White House in September by the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Bob Graham. The White House had only just begun to roll out its propaganda campaign on the fictive Iraqi nuclear weapons program at that point.
He got away with it then, even though plenty of people knew that Iraq had no WMD programs (this from 2004):
On Sunday, the former UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, told Y-Net, an Israeli newswire, that the Israeli intelligence services reached the conclusion years ago that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction.
"In the end, if the Israeli intelligence knew that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, so the CIA knew it and thus British intelligence too" he said.
And one has to wonder -- did Iran ever have a weapons program at all? There is little or no evidence to support that it ever did.
The NIE claims that ‘Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003’. This report now in circulation, and being repeated by every media outlet, and as importantly, by way of word of mouth, is giving credibility to the warmongers that Iran actually had a nuclear weapons program, with the idea that ‘repetition begets belief’. Drumming home a false message, the White House will get the justification it needs to impose further sanctions, with the idea of escalating into a war.
In December 2002, an Iranian terrorist group, the Mojahedeen-e Khalg (MEK), listed on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, informed the U.S. government of the existence of two nuclear sites in Iran. Sy Hersh later revealed in The New Yorker that Israel had provided them with this information. It must also be pointed out that as a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran is not under any obligations to inform the IAEA of construction sites. However, members must inform the Atomic Agency 180 days prior to introducing uranium processing equipment and material to the site. Once the United States confirmed the existence of the sites by satellite, it accused Tehran of "across-the-board pursuit of weapons of mass destruction." To dispel such accusations, Iran agreed to intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. This accusation was false.
Iran was late in reporting which is a Safeguard issue. In a spirit of cooperation, and in an attempt to demonstrate its in October 2003, after meeting French, German and British foreign ministers, Tehran voluntarily stopped the process of enriched uranium; it also allowed the IAEA to carry out intrusive, spot inspections. No country has allowed as many inspection hours as Iran. In the meanwhile, it proposed to operate Iran’s enrichment program as joint ventures with private and public sector firms from other countries; this would ensure that the program remained transparent and could not be secretly diverted for military purposes, at the same time it would maintain Iran’s sovereignty by having an indigenously enriched uranium cycle (source: IAEA Bulletin Online, vol 46, no 2, 2004 "Nuclear fuel cycle: which way forward for multilateral approaches?") . Although this was rejected, Iran continued to cooperate.
Iran suspended its enrichment activities for two and half years, but each time under pressure from the U.S., the burden of proof was transferred to Iran knowing the negative could not be proved. Instead of Iran getting the full cooperation of the IAEA for the development of nuclear technology, it was ordered to stop preparations for large-scale uranium enrichment. In 2005 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell labeled Iran a growing danger and called for the UN Security Council to impose sanctions.
This is absolute proof that if we don't bring Cheney to justice, he will simply repeat his crimes. He is a serial war criminal, a threat to world peace and public safety. He, and his collaborators, need to be indicted, convicted, removed from office, and permanently incarcerated.
(Note: Hat tip to clammyc's diary that covered some of this same ground. When I did a search on this story I discovered his diary and used some of his links as well. I think this story deserves a LOT more attention).