IRAN. NUKE. SHOWDOWN.
reported by Chrish – August 24, 2006 – 39 comments

Just think about that for a moment. It’s simple, it’s concise, it’s scary, and it’s a warning. Are you good and scared? Enough to support the administration in another pre-emptive attack against another country that poses no threat to us? That’s what the drill is and has been at FOX News for months and months now.

William Rivers Pitt wrote in January that

“The intelligence specialists in the United States, Germany and Israel all agree that Iran is between three and five years away from being able to manufacture nuclear weapons. This, of course, is based on the premise that such manufacture is Iran’s goal. Take it as a given that it is, and we have at least three years to use diplomacy, economic pressures and possibly sanctions to keep them from creating these bombs.But “three to five years” isn’t going to help the GOP win the midterm elections. They need things to be scary, and they need things to be scary now. The same right-wing groups that ginned up the fantasy that Iraq was laden with weapons of mass destruction, and was an imminent threat, are now at work building up a martial froth about Iran. They did this in time for the midterms last time, and are preparing to do it again.

United Press International carried a story last Thursday about a group called the Foundation for Democracy in Iran. This group, according to the UPI story, claims that, “Tehran is planning a nuclear weapons test before the Iranian New Year on March 20, 2006.” FDI, according to the story, offered absolutely no proof to back this claim. But that’s not three to five years. That’s less than ten weeks. Scary stuff, right?

Take a closer look, however, and you can see the fingerprints of the architects of our current Iraq boondoggle all over this. The Foundation for Democracy in Iran is run by a man named Kenneth Timmerman. Timmerman is umbilically connected to the godfather of right-wing think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. It was the American Enterprise Institute that spawned the Project for the New American Century, the think tank that gave us Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, the original noise about Iraqi WMD, and the idea that a military takeover of the entire Mideast is a bully idea. The same people that terrorized the American people into unnecessary war in Iraq are preparing to do the same with Iran, and all in time for the midterms.”

And Larissa Alexandrova of rawstory.com has written for Alternet.org :

” The Bush administration continues to bypass standard intelligence channels and use what some believe to be propaganda tactics to create a compelling case for war with Iran, US foreign experts and former US intelligence officials have said.One former senior intelligence official is particularly concerned by private briefings that Vice President Dick Cheney is getting from former Office of Special Plans (OSP) Director, Abram Shulsky.

“Vice President Cheney is relying on personal briefings from Shulsky for current intelligence on Iran,” said this intelligence official.

Shulsky, a leading Neoconservative and member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), headed the shadowy and secretive Department of Defense’s OSP in the lead-up to the Iraq war — helping to locate intelligence that would support the Bush administration’s case for war with Iraq.Several foreign policy experts, who wish to remain anonymous, have expressed serious concern that much like the OSP, the ID is manipulating, cherry picking, and perhaps even — as some suspect — cooking intelligence to lead the U.S. into another conflict, this time with Iran.

“Cheney distrusts the information being disseminated by CIA on Iran,” said one former senior intelligence official. “The reports assembled by the Iranian Directorate at the Pentagon differ significantly from the analysis produced by the Intelligence Community. The Pentagon Iranian Directorate relies on thin and unsupported reporting from foreign sources.”

FOX is doing their part in preparing the American public for the necessity of a strike on Iran with an incessant, literal drumbeat of war, evidenced here in part:

The tactic of drilling and repitition has been well documented on this site. Remember the “flip-flop” segment in “Outfoxed“? Tax and spend? Cut and run? This is more of the same, seen regularly on most of the major shows. Viewers are indoctrinated to believing there’s a “showdown” (great, I thought we were done with failed cowboy diplomacy) and Bush is going to swagger into Iran and save us, like he did in Iraq.

I’ll give these people one thing, no matter how horribly things are going they don’t deviate from Plan A. Some people say that’s resolute but more and more people say that’s just dumb. Maybe even insane.

Taken with the recent blatant media manipulation of declaring terror threats for political purposes, this administration retains no credibility to skeptical, tired Americans. Only the ideologically blinded cannot see (or will not see) that they are being yanked around – again. […]

To defeat the bug, you must understand the bug.

Is this really happening? I mean honestly, when we used to see examples of this sort of TV in the movies,  we laughed our bollocks off, and now, its REAL and RIGHT IN OUR FACES.

Would you like to know more?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Astonishing, TV.