You just know these bastards would do it……..

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - After revelations of a US administration policy to hold Iran responsible for any al-Qaeda attack on the United States that could be portrayed as planned on Iranian soil, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned last week that Washington might use such an incident as a pretext to bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, the national security adviser to president Jimmy Carter from 1977 through 1980 and the most senior Democratic Party figure on national’security policy, told a private meeting sponsored by the non-partisan Committee for the Republic in

Washington on May 30 that an al-Qaeda terrorist attack in the US intended to provoke war between the United States and Iran was a possibility that must be taken seriously, and that the administration of President George W Bush might accuse Iran of responsibility for such an attack and use it to justify carrying out an attack on Iran.

Brzezinski suggested that new constraints are needed on presidential war powers to reduce the risk of a war against Iran based on such a false pretense. Such constraints, Brzezinski said, should not prevent the president from using force in response to an attack on the US, but should make it more difficult to carry out an attack without adequate justification.

Brzezinski’s warning came a few weeks after the publication in April of former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet’s memoirs, which revealed that CIA officials had told Iranian officials in a face-to-face meeting that the Bush administration would hold Iran responsible for any al-Qaeda attack on the US that was planned from Iranian territory.

The administration has made persistent claims over the past five years that Iran has harbored al-Qaeda operatives who had fled from Afghanistan and that they had participated in planning terrorist actions - claims that were not supported by intelligence analysts.

More at the Asia Times

H/T Bur$atil for this post!