Pass The Popcorn

Harry Reid:

“I am growing increasingly concerned about the White House’s inconsistent explanations of when the President was told about important new intelligence information regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions. It appears the President and Vice President were briefed in August on this information, before both the President and Vice President began to ratchet up their increasingly-heated rhetoric on the threat of Iran.

“I urge the White House to fully and accurately explain what the President and Vice President knew and when they knew it, and why the Administration’s rhetoric was not adjusted when presented with new data this summer.

As I said earlier, the information that's starting to trickle out will be devastating. CNN is now reporting:

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.

Adm. Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told Bush the new information might cause intelligence officials to change their assessment of the Iranian program, but said analysts needed to review the new data before making a final judgment, White House press secretary Dana Perino said late Wednesday.

"Director McConnell said that the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran's covert nuclear program, but the intelligence community was not prepared to draw any conclusions at that point in time, and it wouldn't be right to speculate until they had time to examine and analyze the new data," Perino said in a statement issued by the White House.

This doesn't come from a whistleblower, this is from Dana Perino's own statement.

All of the spinning by discredited figures like John Bolton (who actually argues today that the intelligence community is too focused on "the latest hot tidbit" of information - you mean like Curveball?) is a lot of noise. The truth is that Bush has been exposed as lying abut Iran just as he was lying about Iraq. His contention that the NIE proves that Iran had a nuclear program in 2003 means this:

What it really means is that faced with two neighbors in the spring of 2003 who both harbored nuclear ambitions, we invaded the country without an active WMD program while ignoring the one that did. I'm not suggesting we should have invaded Iran instead, but by the Administration's own reckoning, we should have.

It puts an exclamation point on the colossal folly of our Iraq adventure.

I didn't think we were headed for hearings on this, but now it's looking more and more that way. This was another attempt to lie us into war.

UPDATE: Haaretz is saying that the Israelis knew about the NIE for a month. It's not credible that the President didn't know about it, but a foreign entity did.

UPDATE II: Why isn't Joe Klein run out of America on a rail? He claims that the Administration has shown a tremendous bit of candor in releasing the report. Candor? They blocked it for a year and lied about when they knew about it!