Ross: White House making same mistakes all over again with Iran

Nada Bakos is a former CIA targeter. She wrote a book about eliminating al Qaeda terrorist, Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

Ross: Is the USA starting ‘a peace’ with Iran?

“He killed so many innocent civilians — that was the focus of my job,” she described.

So, it’s safe to say she knows something about al Qaeda. She says the Iranian government, radical though it may be, is not connected to al Qaeda, and her former colleagues at the CIA are right now trying to make that clear to the White House.

“They’re gonna be going through all the intelligence, and then giving them the bottom line about the basically passive relationship Iran has had with al Qaeda, and trying to get the administration to listen to that,” Bakos continued.

But she’s worried that just as the White House ignored the intelligence before invading Iraq, it is ignoring the intelligence now.

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“Right now the White House and administration is really trying to push through any military action with Iran based on the 2001 (Authorizations for Use of Military Force),” she said. “And that’s the regulation we used to go into Afghanistan after 9/11 to go after al Qaeda, which is why they’re trying to tie this back to al Qaeda again — so they can do this under that regulation.”

While Nada Bakos is no longer with the CIA, she’s speaking out because she sees us flirting with the same kind of mistake that she witnessed before the decision to invade Iraq: Letting an agenda trump the intelligence.

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