House Republicans Picked a Perfectly Terrible Panel to Complain About the Iran Deal

Speaking of false narratives.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the ranking Democrat and chairman of the House Oversight Committee, attend a committee hearing.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


After the New York Times Magazine published a controversial profile of Ben Rhodes, the White House’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, conservatives exploded in outrage over the article’s portrayal of Rhodes manipulating the media to secure passage of the Iran nuclear deal. Republican senators have called for Rhodes to resign, and the House Oversight Committee even held a hearing on Tuesday to look into “White House Narratives on the Iran Nuclear Deal.”

But, as our David Corn noted yesterday, one of the three witnesses has plenty of experience in planting “false narratives:” John Hannah, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who played a key role in promoting the flawed intelligence behind the invasion of Iraq. Corn wrote that “Hannah was one of the architects of the speech then-Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the United Nations in February 2003 that was designed to pave the way to war.” And he’s not the only one who noticed.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, blasted Hannah in his opening statement at the hearing. “If our goal is to hear from an expert who actually promoted false White House narratives, then I think you picked the right person,” he said. “But if our goal is to hear from someone who was not involved in one of the biggest misrepresentations in our nation’s history, then you picked the wrong person. Listening to John Hannah criticize anyone else for pushing a false White House narrative is beyond ironic. He and Dick Cheney and their colleagues in the White House wrote the how-to manual on this.”

Hannah wasn’t the only perfectly wrong choice on the three-man panel. Another witness, Michael Rubin, was a Pentagon official during the invasion of Iraq and later worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the post-war American occupation government. Rubin was a strong backer of Ahmad Chalabi, the late Shiite dissident who used fake intelligence to push the war in Iraq and whom many neoconservatives promoted as a potential future Iraqi leader. Rubin backed Chalabi and defended him even after Chalabi was suspected of passing intelligence to Iran in 2004. The third witness, Michael Doran, was also a Bush-era official at the Pentagon and the National Security Council.

Cummings, for his part, couldn’t figure out why the hearing was taking place at all. “Other committees have held dozens of substantive hearings on the Iran agreement,” he said. “Do you know how many this committee has held? Zero…Yet, all of a sudden, now our committee is rushing to hold today’s hearing without even the one-week notice required by House rules.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate