Blowing By The Truth

So yesterday, the consensus of the nation's intelligence agencies, with a high degree of confidence, was that Iran stopped any efforts to gain nuclear weapons years ago and are several years away from having one should they opt to work toward one. In the real world, this was a bombshell. In the demented world of a rogue President, it didn't mean a thing.

George Bush today ruled out a change in Washington's Iran policy following the declassification yesterday of a US intelligence report that concluded Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.

The US president denied the national intelligence estimate (NIE) - which said Tehran's determination to develop nuclear weapons "is less ... than we have been judging" - had undercut his administration's repeated assertions that Iran was building nuclear weapons.

"Iran was dangerous. Iran is dangerous. And Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," Bush told his first White House press conference in nearly seven weeks.

"Knowledge" is the key word here. The goalposts have just been shifted. If Iran has the "knowledge" to build a nuclear program, they must be attacked. And by the way, if they were on the Internet when Peter Hoekstra published plans for how to build a nuclear weapon, then they know how to make one. Knowledge and intention are hundreds of miles apart.

But not to George Bush. Because the case for intention has been completely discredited by his own spooks. So now he's falling back to knowledge. It was the same thing they did with Iraq, first we knew they had weapons, then we knew they had weapons programs, then we knew they had a weapons book, then a weapons hankerin', then a fever for the flavor of a weapon...

The public isn't going to back a war over knowledge. Without a nuclear program, there's also no target, which means that the warhawks calling for airstrikes just want to level the country. And further reports show that these nutjobs can't believe the truth because it doesn't conform to their biases:

Several of those involved in preparing the new assessment said that when intelligence officials began briefing senior members of the Bush administration on the intercepts, beginning in July, the policymakers expressed skepticism. Several of the president's top advisers suggested the intercepts were part of a clever Iranian deception campaign, the officials said.

Intelligence officers then spent months examining whether the new information was part of a well-orchestrated ruse. Their effort included "Red Team" exercises in which groups of intelligence officers tried to punch holes in the new evidence, substantially delaying publication of the NIE.

The White House is banking on the public not understanding the difference between a civilian nuclear energy program being done in internationally supervised sites and a scary scary nuclear program. They managed to delay the truth but not submarine it, a triumph of intelligence agencies badly burned by the cooked books on Iraq. I believe there's a reason Bob Gates asked for a surge of diplomacy and increased funding for the State Department. He is a bit less crazy than the neocons, and he gets that peace and stability are a positive development, not a threat to be spun.

UPDATE: It's worth noting that the President lied again when saying that he was told about "new information" regarding Iran back in August or September, but he WASN'T TOLD WHAT THAT INFORMATION WAS. See, he was out of the loop, being the President and all.