Damn the NIE, it’s full speed ahead.
President Bush was told in August that Iran’s nuclear weapons program “may
be suspended,” the White House said Wednesday, which seemingly contradicts
the account of the meeting given by Bush Tuesday. … ..The new account from Perino seems to contradict the president’s version of
his August conversation with McConnell and raised new questions about why
Bush continued to warn the American public about a threat from Iran two months
after being told a new assessment was in the works. … ..Bush told in
August that Iran nuke program ‘may be suspended’
Who can forget this nugget from Mr. Bush.
“If you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you
ought to be preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make
a nuclear weapon.”
The contradictions in these two realities seems not to have bothered the New
York Times or the Washington Post. When I couldn’t find anything
substantial I started surfing around to see if I’d missed anything. As Greg
Sargent also points out, traditional media is AWOL on the whole subject.
Evidently they just can’t bring themselves to call Mr. Bush what he is, the
most incurious and incompetent president in U.S. history, not to mention a teller
of tall tales. Senator
Joe Biden didn’t have that problem.
The apparent gap between what U.S. intelligence officials knew in August
and Bush’s later warnings drew sharp criticism from Sen. Joseph Biden, the
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Democratic presidential
candidate, who called Bush’s explanation unbelievable.“I refuse to believe that,” Biden said Tuesday. “If that’s
true, he has the most incompetent staff in modern American history, and he’s
one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.”
Steve Clemons
wins the headline prize: MoveOn.org Shouldn’t Attack Petraeus BUT Bolton
Can Smear Entire National Intelligence Establishment? John Bolton is back
and he’s even
more unhinged than usual.
After all, this is a fact free Administration, beyond what they concoct on
their own. The U.S. intelligence agencies were bypassed for the White House Iraq Group’s stovepiping, so why not do the same thing on Iran. Nobody in the traditional media seems to care. But let’s remember that our intel agencies are making great effort to expose the truth. It’s just that the president doesn’t think he has to listen, even when they have proof to back their findings.
American intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran’s
nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations
of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program,
senior intelligence and government officials said on Wednesday. … ..… .. But they said that the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies
had organized a “red team” to determine if the new information
might have been part of an elaborate disinformation campaign mounted by Iran
to derail the effort to impose sanctions against it.In the end, American intelligence officials rejected that theory, though
they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago
in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were
described to the most senior members of President Bush’s national security
team, including Vice President Dick Cheney. … ..
Dan
Froomkin does the job his own paper refuses to do.
If the traditional media doesn’t cover the biggest story in U.S. intelligence
history did it ever happen?
Joe Klein strikes again.
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