keep your enemies close, and your motives closer

* speaking of the secret israel/iran access axis, here's clemons:

"One of the issues that came up in many of the national security related discussions I had was that Israel has maintained and cultivated a very strong human intelligence network inside Iran. The two nations were close strategic allies 25 years ago -- and continue, in many behind-the- scenes ways, to communicate and possibly even to coordinate certain actions. It doesn't mean that Israel is ready to appease Iran's regional ambitions, but it does mean that I have witnessed far more worries about Iranian President Ahmadinejad's anti-Holocaust and anti-Israel rhetoric in the U.S. than I did in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem."

he then quotes chris nelson at length (who is scared), and then clemons continues:

"But just a friendly note to all of those out there planning some hostile action against Iran -- either as a summer fiasco or just as a back-up plan -- pleae read the Iran chapter in James Risen's State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.

While Risen has been winning awards and accolades for breaking the story on warrantless wiretaps, his revealing two key CIA mistakes on Iran is also incredibly important.

Risen reports that America botched the leaking of true Russian designs for a nuclear warhead trigger device that had embedded in it some flaws which America hoped might lead Iran's nuclear program down a frustrating and incorrect path. The Russian defector the U.S. used to transmit these plans to the Iranian delegation to the IAEA actually informed the Iranians that there were mistakes in the blueprints.

Secondly, in an episode that is hardly believable but still rings true, a CIA headquarters officer accidentally sent an electronic communication to ALL of our human assets in Iran, those working for the CIA and those collaborating, in a manner such that someone on the other end could discern who all the others in the network were.

Iran has subsequently "rolled up" our network and shut down America's eyes and ears inside Iran.

Add to this the Valerie Plame affair -- in which it has been reported that she too was working to gain intelligence on Iran's nuclear program. Of course, that operation has been spiked.

And does anyone remember that it was Ahmed Chalabi's team who informed Iran that the U.S. had broken its codes. It was the Iraqi National Congress's intel chief who turned out to be an Iranian spy. Chalabi's operation worked out of Douglas Feith's legal office before Feith moved into DoD. And Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress's lawyer was former CIA Director R. James Woolsey."

read the rest

one thing is for sure, i dont have a clue what is going on, or why. heck, i still don't understand why they invaded iraq.