Wilkerson: Administration Rejected Iran Overtures in 2003

In an interview on the BBC News program Newsnight, former senior aide to Colin Powell Lawrence Wilkerson said that Vice President Cheney and other ideologues at the White House rejected Iran's offers of concessions in return for talks in 2003 despite enthusiasm for the proposals at the State Department. Washington Snubbed Offer

Tehran proposed ending support for Lebanese and Palestinian militant groups and helping to stabilise Iraq following the US-led invasion.

Offers, including making its nuclear programme more transparent, were conditional on the US ending hostility.

But Vice-President Dick Cheney's office rejected the plan, the official said.

The offers came in a letter, seen by Newsnight, which was unsigned but which the US state department apparently believed to have been approved by the highest authorities.

In return for its concessions, Tehran asked Washington to end its hostility, to end sanctions, and to disband the Iranian rebel group the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq and repatriate its members.


But as soon as it got to the White House, the old mantra of 'We don't talk to evil'... reasserted itself
Lawrence Wilkerson
Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had allowed the rebel group to base itself in Iraq, putting it under US power after the invasion.

One of the then Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aides told the BBC the state department was keen on the plan - but was over-ruled.

"We thought it was a very propitious moment to do that," Lawrence Wilkerson told Newsnight.

"But as soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the Vice-President's office, the old mantra of 'We don't talk to evil'... reasserted itself."

Observers say the Iranian offer as outlined nearly four years ago corresponds pretty closely to what Washington is demanding from Tehran now.

Once again we see the Administration's preference for dogmatic and destructive consistency instead of flexibility and negotiation with the goal of minimizing casualties.

I hope Congress's various Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees investigate these allegations to the fullest extent possible. Not only has the Administration's policies provided fodder for Ahmadinejad's extremist diatribes, but they have set in motion the distinct possibility that the Administration may choose to launch a unilateral pre-emptive attack upon Iran under a pretext of nuclear threat, a threat which, if it could even be conceded exists, could have been obviated by merely agreeing to talk to Iran as long ago as 2003.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

From TPM Muckraker comes this charming article listing all the stuff the Bush Administration doesn't want you to know: Bush Admin: What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Us, by Paul Kiel.

Among items the Bush Administration has decided to stop publishing or to reclassify as secret:

the Department of Defense has suddenly classified the numbers of attacks in Iraq for September through November of this year -- after providing the figures for every month since the war began. Why classify the information now? If there's a good explanation, we don't know it, and the Pentagon isn't returning our calls.

As others have noted, it's far from the first time that the administration has tried to deep-six data that was unhelpful to its goals. Over the years, they've discontinued annual reports, classified normally public data, de-funded studies, quieted underlings, and generally done whatever was necessary to keep bad information under wraps.

Wouldn't it be great to have all those examples in one place? Thankfully, Steve Benen at the Carpetbagger Report has started us off on that goal ...

Steve's list is quite helpful and constantly under revision as readers add their own stories of the Bush Administration's obsessive secretiveness. The theory appears to be that no news is better than bad news, so in the face of government incompetence, or mis, mal or nonfeasance, and in the face of unfortunate ecological consequences of present policies or disparate income impacts on ordinary people of Bush's tax cuts, the Administration's best option is to simply declare it all secret or to stop publishing the information. This is called the "Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil" approach to public information, or the Sergeant Schulz Two-Step.

Here's the link to the Carpetbagger report: Keeping Iraq attack numbers under wraps