A Coordinated Campaign Of Propaganda

The Blotter (the ABC news blog) has just published an article that the Commander Guy has allegedly authorised covert action against Iran:

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.
The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions

Well, that probably explains yesterday’s story in the Guardian.

But wait, there’s more! The Blotter’s story itself may be part of this campaign of disinformation.

Remarkably quickly, rightwing pundits have marched in lockstep with a single message about this revelation: blame the leak on the liberals and add that the leak makes an attack on Iran the only option left.

The White House intended on using this plan to keep from having to use a military option to stop the mullahs from getting their hands on a nuclear weapon. In fact, ABC reports that Dick Cheney preferred the military option, but that Bush overruled him in favor of the covert action instead. As I have written repeatedly here, a military strike is a lousy choice given the terrain, battleground, and options for targets in Iran as well as the political situation on the ground.

Thanks to the loose lips at Langley and ABC, that option may have to go back to the top of the list. Covert actions that appear on national television tend to lose the element of surprise, after all, and the Iranians can now take steps to block these actions… Someone in the CIA or in the larger “intelligence community” can’t keep their mouths shut. Thanks to them, we may wind up with no other option against Iranian nuclear ambitions except the military strike.

and Wizbang’s Kim Priestly adds:

Prediction: at some point, the nutroots will accuse Cheney of ordering a member of his staff to leak the President’s secret covert action to ABC in order to force the military strikes that Bush overruled.

Given the speed with which the extreme Right has established message discipline and given the admission that the Bush administration was already conducting propaganda operations against Iran, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable accusation to make. Interesting that Kim thought of it first. But we may never know what the truth is.

UPDATE: In response to these allegations from the wingnutocracy, The Blotter published the following:

In a statement ABC News said, “In the six days since we first contacted the CIA and the White House, at no time did they indicate that broadcasting this report would jeopardize lives or operations on the ground. ABC News management gave them the repeated opportunity to make whatever objection they wanted to regarding our report. They chose not to.”

ABC News said, “This piece was very carefully reported, and it puts solid facts on the table concerning a crucial foreign policy challenge facing the United States and the world.”

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