What everyone will be talking about is the striking similarity between the incorrect statements and assessments from the White House on both Iraqi and Iranian weapons programs.

TERRORISM TAKES A HOLIDAY: So, today is the day the Brits celebrate an anti-Christian, civilian-bombing, government-hating insurgent by going door-to-door and asking for money ("Penny for the Guy?"). Why do the British hate America? . . . . Michael Mukasey would approve: After he was captured, before he could detonate his bomb that was intended to destroy the Protestant Parliament, Fawkes was tortured, at the explicit direction of King James, who instructed that the torture should be gentle at first, and increase in severity. (And yes, I’m sure King James had a note from his solicitor general saying that the whole thing was perfectly OK, provided there was no organ failure.) "The torture only revealed the names of those conspirators who were already dead or whose names were known to the authorities," according to Wikipedia. Why does Wikipedia hate America?

I went to the Jerusalem Post looking for the story that said that Al Jazeera said that it was the USAF that bombed Syria September 6th. I got sidetracked by this article:

Preventing World War III

In it columnist Caroline Glick claims that in 2005 elBaradei said that Iran could produce a nuclear bomb in "a few months." I was struck by that claim and decided to follow it up. I have quoted the relevant part of her article below.

Take for example the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency Muhammad elBaradei's recent remarks on the subject. Speaking to ,i>Le Monde on Monday, elBaradei asserted that it will take Iran between three to eight years to acquire a nuclear arsenal. Consequently, he argued, there is no reason to consider conducting a military strike against Teheran's program. There is still plenty of time for diplomacy, or sanctions or even incentives for the ayatollahs, he said.

The keys to the new Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker come in flavors of both good news and bad news, on the Bush Administration's warmongering against Iran.

The good news?

I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the "execute order" that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued.

Furthermore, understanding that the American public isn't buying his demonizing of Iran, Bush has realized that he can't sell an all-out war. He also seems to understand that Iran really is at least five years from having nuclear weapons capabilities, so there is no imminent threat.

The bad news?

Before we all lose it over the Senate's asinine Iran resolution, I thought we should all take deep breaths and calm down! The Senate did not authorize military action against Iran! The most dangerous wording in the Lieberman-Kyl resolution was removed before the vote!

This Washington Post article is about Iran and neo-con blustering about Iran but the respected (by non-neo-cons) head of the IAEA made an astonishing claim about the casualties of the current Iraq war, per this article.  Keep in mind that at least 100,000 Iraqi conscripts and Iraqi Revolutionary Guard troops were killed a few years earlier by George Jr.'s daddy.  Another recent news article recently said that Americans have killed more Iraqis than Saddam....

700,000.  Even the "news" report's 80,000 is mind-boggling!

How vile do Republicans have to get before regular Americans realize how murderous and evil Republicans are?  For oil.  For corporate hegemony.  For SUVs and otherwise greedy, hateful Earth Rapists.  That's why they do it.

700,000:

With tensions again building between the Bush Administration and the current regime in Iran, and with even some leading Democrats participating in the hyperbole about Iran's supposed dangers, this would seem to be a good time to consult the world's foremost objective expert on Iran's nuclear weapons program.  Spiegel Online did just that, in a wide-ranging interview with United Nations chief weapons inspector, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mohamed ElBaradei.

Even though Mohamed ElBaradei is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, he's not resting on his laurels. Continuing in his role as the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, he handed in his report on Iran's nuclear program to the IAEA's Board of Governors yesterday.

Reuters got a hold of a copy and summed it up: "Iran's uranium enrichment program is operating well below capacity and is far from producing nuclear fuel in significant amounts." A passing grade, in other words.

"'Iran made a fast start but then there was a leveling off,' said a senior U.N. official versed in the IAEA's findings. 'We don't know the reasons, but the slow pace continues.'"

Admittedly, it's difficult to believe that, 60 years after the discovery of nuclear power, a nation as resourceful as Iran is still stumbling around trying to replicate the process. But once the nuclear black market of Pakistan's A.Q. Khan was knocked out of commission, nuclear expertise, equipment and material have been hard to come by.

To read the rest, visit Scholars & Rogues.

On May 11 Cheney warned Iran from the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf that the United States will not permit Iran to develope nuclear weapons. "With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we're sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike."  

Cheney-Bush and their friends are orchestrating a continual stream of revelations about Iran's role in arming and training Iraqi militias. Joe Lieberman says the war has already begun. "Iran has initiated a deadly military confrontation with us, from bases in Iran, which we ignore at our peril, and at the peril of our allies throughout the Middle East."

In another parallel to the run-up to invading Iraq, a NYTimes reporter has a "source" for Iran's evil-doing who is weirdly similar to their "source" for the mobile bio-war labs in Iraq.

Judith Miller had "Curveball." Michael Gordon has "Hamid the Mute."

2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, caused quite a stir recently when he refered to persons who want to bomb Iran as "the new crazies".

Dr. ElBaradei's phrase is reminscent, in terms of its potential power to wake the quiescent, if not (yet) in terms of its effect, of Joseph Welch's response to Senator McCarthy in 1954: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?  Have you left no sense of decency?"

To see why, let's look at the context of Dr. ElBaradei's choice of words.

(In context, the unmentioned "old crazies" would have to be the advocates of bombing Iraq in 2003.)

Welcome to the Overnight News Digest.

Top Stories

• Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said "You do not want to give additional argument to new crazies who say, ‘Let’s go and bomb Iran’ ...I wake up every morning and see 100 Iraqis, innocent civilians, are dying." ElBaradei told the BBC that one could not "bomb knowledge." When asked who the "new crazies" were, he said: "Those who have extreme views and say the only solution is to impose our will by force."

• The "taller, wider" flood barrier that replaced the ones that burst and flooded New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina have been rebuilt. However, they cannot handle a Katriana-sized storm.

• Speaker Nancy Pelosi "is planning an announcement soon on an independent ethics commission that will help police members’ conduct."

All we hear about in our news media is the looming danger of Iran's nuclear program.  According to Ex-General, now Cable News Military Expert, Barry McCaffery, Iran is certain to get nukes (and Saudi Arabia, too), and there is nothing we can do to stop it.  Former UN Ambassador (by back door appointment) John Bolton claims diplomacy with Iran has failed (before we've even tried it), and its time to kick our unilateral "regime changing machine" into high gear.  Even Iranian President Ahmadinejad has gotten into the act, claiming that soon Iran has started "industrial scale" enrichment of uranium with thousands of new centrifuges.

Sounds like a dire situation doesn't it?  Well, yes, it does, unless ...

(cont.)

A handy compendium of times Bush failed to hear (and heed):

UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, January 9, 2003:

We have now been there for some two months and been covering the country in ever wider sweeps and we haven't found any smoking guns.

More...

I must admit, I had a bit of a Scooby-Doo moment yesterday when I heard State Department spokesman Sean McCormack speaking about a report due out next month from the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Iran’s nuclear program:

The IAEA officials "are the only ones on the ground in the position to assess by how much Iran is expanding its programs, whether or not they're introducing UF6 feedstock into the centrifuges, or exactly what is the state of their program," he told reporters.

HRRNNNHHHH???

Well, doesn't this sound familiar...

From the Los Angeles Times:

Although international concern is growing about Iran's nuclear program and its regional ambitions, diplomats here say most U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran.

The officials said the CIA and other Western spy services had provided sensitive information to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency at least since 2002, when Iran's long-secret nuclear program was exposed. But none of the tips about supposed secret weapons sites provided clear evidence that the Islamic Republic was developing illicit weapons.

"Since 2002, pretty much all the intelligence that's come to us has proved to be wrong," a senior diplomat at the IAEA said. Another official here described the agency's intelligence stream as "very cold now" because "so little panned out."

Despite the propaganda and the disinformation currently being dispensed by the governments of Israel and the United States, which paint Iran as an imminent threat only months away from testing a nuclear device, Iran is a very, very long way from producing enough bomb grade nuclear material needed to make even one small explosive device, much less bombs that can be used as the warheads of ballistic missiles.  How far away? The Guardian, in this report, lays bare the details of the true nature of Iran's nuclear program as a primitive, chaotic shambles:

Game. Set. Match.

My jaw dropped to the floor when reading an article yesterday from Reuters News Service, after which, I shouted with celebratory glee, knowing that the neocons have been foiled in their lust to invade Iran!

In what may turn out to be perhaps one of the most important statements made by anyone this year, 2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, speaking at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, in Monterey, California, completely pulled the rug out from under Bush and the neocons in their rush to attack Iran.

More after the fold:

April 13, 2006, WILLIAM J. BROAD, NAZILA FATHI and JOEL BRINKLEY of the New York Times have just published an article quoting experts and analysts who say that Iran is still years away from developing a nuclear weapons capability. Analysts Say a Nuclear Iran Is Years Away
Which raises serious questions about the Bush Administration's apparent rush to War.  

For the last week we've heard of plans for a possible tactical nuclear strike against Iraq's "imminent threat" and Lolligolli is reporting in her outstanding diary today that Dick Cheney has approved on an ongoing operation using an Iraqi terrorist group to launch special operations attacks inside of Iran.  

Could it be that this sudden urgency of focus on Iran is part of a Rovian plot to divert attention from President Bush' s plummeting approval polls?  Is it conceivable that Bush and Rove could be this deceitful?