Day: December 5, 2007

Nobody does incredulous as well as Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) After hearing George Bush claim he wasn’t specifically told until now that Iran shut down its nuclear program in 2003 just like we asked it to, Biden threatened to bring impeachment charges against him if he orders an attack on Iran without the consent of Congress.

A day later we find out, via an email from Press Secretary Dana Perino, that Bush was lying about everything.

Biden yesterday: “Are you telling me a president who’s briefed every single morning, who’s fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies of the United States government said [Iran] had abandoned their effort for nuclear weapons in 2003?” White House today: “Oh yeah, we just remembered, we were told in August.”

During a press conference on Tuesday, the President told reporters that he was briefed that there was new intelligence information about Iran, but nothing specific.

“I was made aware of the NIE last week,” Bush said Tuesday. “In August, I think it was [Director of National Intelligence] Mike McConnell came in and said, we have some new information. He didn’t tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze.”

However today the White House is saying the President was told much more…

Perino stated Bush had been told in August that Iran suspended it’s (sic) covert nuclear weapons program.

“In August, DNI Director McConnell advised President Bush that the intelligence community would not be able to meet a congressionally imposed deadline requiring a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran because new information had been obtained just as they were about to finalize the report,” Perino wrote in an emailed response…

Perino also said McConnell told the President the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran’s covert nuclear program.

Biden was proven correctomundo in challenging Bush’s version of the facts. PR Editor Jon was also right that Bush was dishonestly blaming his intelligence director.

“Are you telling me a president who’s briefed every single morning, who’s fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies of the United States government said [Iran] had abandoned their effort for nuclear weapons in 2003?” [Biden asked.]

…Senator Biden also today reiterated that should President Bush initiate an attack on Iran without Congress approval, Biden would call for impeachment. In an afternoon Democratic debate hosted by NPR, Biden stated flatly, “you cannot trust this president.”

Repercussions continue to shake out in the wake of the release this week of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that says Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program four years ago.

At a news conference yesterday, George Bush denied knowing that U.S. intelligence had learned the Iranian program had been suspended when he warned the American people last month that Iran was on the verge of launching World War III. He was not lying, he suggested, but rather it was his own incompetence that led him to give the false warning. He said that when Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell told him in August that new information about the program had come to light, Bush did not bother to ask the DNI about the nature of the new developments.

If the muted response from reporters at the news conference to this assertion is a guide, journalists close to the White House believe that it while it is unacceptable for Bush to lie to them, it is perfectly okay for him to issue false predictions about an impending apocalypse if the warnings are based entirely on Bush’s ineptitude and lack of curiosity.

Today we learn that Dick Cheney has known about — and actively suppressed — the intelligence community’s finding for over a year. In particular, Cheney knew that Iran had suspended its weapons program in 2003 when he made this statement on Oct. 21, 2007, in an address to a Washington think tank:

Dismissing Iran’s claims that it is seeking only nuclear energy and not a weapons program, Cheney accused Iranian leaders of pursuing a practice of “delay and deception in an obvious effort to buy time.”

“Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions … The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences.”

Yesterday, on CNN, New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh reminded viewers that he’d reported on White House efforts to suppress the NIE last November:

HERSH: At the time, I wrote that there was a tremendous fight about it, because Cheney in the White House — the vice president did not want to hear this. So that there was a fight about that intelligence. And, actually, for the last year, I think the vice president’s office pretty much has kept — you know, the vice president has kept his foot on the neck of that report. That report was bottled up for a year.

The intelligence we learned about yesterday has been circulating inside this government at the highest levels for the last year — and probably longer.

The complete transcript of Hersh’s interview on CNN follows:

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Something about the way Helen Thomas asked Bush flack Dana Perino about civilian war deaths seemed to rattled Perino’s usual robotic calm: “Helen, I find it really unfortunate that you use your front row position, bestowed upon you by your colleagues, to make such statements… [To] suggest that we, at the United States, are killing innocent people is just absurd and very offensive.”

In reality, over 600,000 Iraqi babies, children and adults have been killed unnecessarily by U.S. bombs in pursuit of Bush’s misguided invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Transcript from Dana Perino’s press briefing on Fiday, Nov. 30, 2007, follows:

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