March 10, 2006 – 9:33 p.m.
The uproar over skewed intelligence on Iraq has hardly died down. But now the administration is back on Capitol Hill fudging the facts about Iran, a far more dangerous adversary than Saddam Hussein ever was.
The Islamic regime in Tehran hardly needs demonizing, as it hurtles toward becoming a nuclear power, conspires with Shiites in Iraq and bankrolls Hezbollah for possible missile attacks against Israel.
The United States, and now even the United Nations, seem to agree on this core fact: Iran represents a clear and present danger to America and Western Europe, not to mention the imploding government in Baghdad.
As if to prove the point, Iran rattled its pre-nuclear saber last week, warning it could inflict “harm and pain” on the United States to match whatever punishment Washington persuades the U.N. Security Council to mete out for Tehran’s refusal to give up atomic research.
So if the administration faces the real prospect of a nuclear nightmare with Iran, why would it risk its already challenged credibility by falsely calling Iran “the central banker for terrorism?”
That was Secretary of State
However nasty the Iranian regime is, experts on terror finance say it’s hardly “the central banker for terrorism” in the world. That distinction still falls to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states — an inconvenient fact for a White House that regards those nations as America’s allies in the global war on terrorism.
“I’m sure the Saudis will be pleased, since they’ve been known as the ‘central bankers’ in the [counterterrorism] community for years,” says Andrew Cochran, who worked closely on terror finance issues as senior oversight counsel at the House Financial Services Committee from 2001-03.
Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Evil Money: Encounters Along the Money Trail, had a similar reaction, suggesting that the administration is eager to shift attention away from the immediate threat: al Qaeda’s cash machines.
“You don’t really expect the administration to say that the Saudis and the Gulf States are still the central bankers for terrorism, do you?” she says. “Dubai, in particular, serves not only as a central banker for Sunni Islamist terrorists but also for the Iranian Shiites” stirring up trouble in Iraq.
To be sure, Rice’s words were as carefully spoken as anything Alan Greenspan ever uttered to a congressional committee, as is the practice of secretaries of state.
So every word Rice chose attracts attention, even when she adds the qualifier that Iran is “the central banker” for terrorism, “whether that terrorism is in southern Iraq or in the Palestinian territories or in Lebanon.”
Lest anybody miss that point, Rice’s undersecretary for political affairs, R. Nicholas Burns, also broadcast the message from the House International Relations Committee.
The key difference between terrorist funding sources, of course, is that the Tehran government itself is pouring money into Hezbollah coffers, as opposed to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where wealthy individuals and traders are vectoring millions to pro-al Qaeda forces around the world.
As former CIA, Treasury Department and Secret Service agent John Cassara says, “Iran is designated a ‘state sponsor of terrorism.’ Neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE is even close to being included in that category.
“In other words, other countries may have the occasional bad apple,” added Cassara, author of the forthcoming Hide and Seek: Intelligence, Law Enforcement, and the Stalled War on Terrorist Finance. “Or sometimes [those governments] may find it expedient to turn the other way, or delay in implementing needed anti-terrorist finance infrastructures.
“But the point I believe Condi was trying to make is that Iran at the highest levels knowingly supports and finances terror as state policy,” Cassara said.
“You got it right that Iran is a state supporting terrorism,” said Victor Comras, a leading expert of terror finance. Comras, a former State Department official, was one of five international monitors to oversee the implementation of U.N. Security Council measures against al Qaeda and terrorism financing.
“The funds come from government-related sources,” Comras said. “But that is also the case when it comes for funds from the Saudi government to Hamas. In fact, there is something of a rivalry between Saudi funding for Hamas and Iran funding for Hezbollah —Wahhabi vs. Shiite fundamentalism.”
And there are even further twists and turns in the terrorist money trail — no surprise for a part of the world that was once the Byzantine Empire.
Here, too, the administration’s choice of words tends to deflect attention from another uncomfortable fact: Afghanistan’s emergence as a major supplier of heroin-finance terror money since the United States ran the Taliban out of Kabul in 2001-02.
“There are serious questions about where the Iranian syndicates get their money,” says Bobby Charles, assistant secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement under both Colin Powell and Rice. Convoys with “60-plus trucks are transiting the Afghan-Iran border,” Charles says. “One can only wonder how much Afghan heroin and money are coming into Iran, and then out” to Hezbollah and other pro-Iranian forces.
And, he adds, Iran is “only one [finance terrorist organization]. There are 25-plus others that likely draw money from drugs, state actors and other activities — beyond any support from Iran.”
There’s no doubt Rice is leading a new Bush administration rhetorical offensive against Iran.
In a telephone conversation late Friday, a State Department spokesman, Justin Higgins, pointed to Iran’s new surreptitious supply of bombs and other military supplies to forces battling the U.S.-backed government in Iraq.
To Comras, a veteran diplomat, it’s “hard to know what the message tone really means here. We are clearly villainizing Iran, but with good reason, given its current leadership and their own tone toward us.
“Each side is raising the tone of the rhetoric to show their commitment to their position,” he said. “It seems to me we are in a real high-stakes game of bluff — chicken — to see who will flinch first.”
Hooverville: FBI headquarters is falling down. So much concrete has been slipping off the behemoth’s facade that its Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk has long been roped off with yellow tape, turning it into a crime scene. In fact, FBI spokesman John Miller told me last week, there have been “a couple” near-death experiences from falling chunks. The problem is the exterior was supposed to be sheathed in marble 35 years ago, but after the much-feared J. Edgar Hoover died amid the Watergate scandal in 1972, Congress shelved the plan. “We are trying to determine when repairs will be made, because annually, there are some events we hold in the courtyard that we may have to move,” Miller said.
Truth Be Told: “NSA is cracking down on people doing research on polygraphy on the Internet,” says an employee of the warrantless-eavesdropping spy agency. “In the past, we were always told not to discuss the polygraph questions with other (job) candidates . . . Now, candidates are being told not to do research (about how the testing works) on the Internet. What are they — a bunch of zombies ?” wonders the employee, posting on the anti-lie detector site nopolygraph.com.
This Just In: The intelligence historian David M. Barrett writes to say he’s dug up yet more previously unknown CIA documents (http://www14.homepage.villanova.edu/david.barrett/) on the Kennedy administration’s disastrous invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1961. One chronicles a meeting between Kennedy, CIA Director Allen Dulles and his covert action division chief Richard Bissell, in which “the goal of overthrowing Castro was ‘unachievable’ under plans under discussion, including the Bay of Pigs landings. “The JFK-Dulles-Bissell meeting has been chronicled in many publications, including Bissell’s memoirs,” says Barrett, author of last year’s The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy. “But no one has ever described this gloomy analysis or Bissell’s apparent failure to share it with President-elect Kennedy.” Barrett, political science professor at Villanova, asks “How, if in mid-November 1960 the concept . . . was ‘unachievable’ . . . did it become ‘achievable’ in March 1961?”
Who Said This? “As al Qaeda marched into a country where it had not dared to tread before, the White House refused to admit that its war allowed them in. As Iran’s influence with Iraqi Shiite clerics and militias quietly expands, the administration refuses to confess its own culpability. As Shiite politicians appear headed to dominate the U.S.-created “democracy” in Iraq, no one is asking “Who lost Iraq to Iran?” —retired Lt. Gen William E. Odom, NSA director from 1985-88, and before that the Army’s top intelligence officer, on Harvard’s niemanwatchdog.org, run by famed Watergate-era Washington Post editor Barry Sussman.
Finally, From the Dept. of Dot Connections: Doug Thompson, proprietor of Capitol Hill Blue, a neighborhood Web site, was none too happy recently when he got a nonjudicial subpoena (called a national security letter) from the FBI demanding “traffic data, payment records and other information about the Web site along with information on me, the publisher.” Under Patriot Act restrictions, he can’t tell anybody about it.
“Now that’s a problem,” Thompson observed. “I own the company that hosts Capitol Hill Blue. So, in effect, the feds want me to turn over information on myself and not tell myself that I’m doing it.”
Thompson says he turned over the letter to his lawyers with instructions to send it back with a two-word message that cannot be repeated here. “Strong letter to follow,” he added.