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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (361560)	12/5/2007 4:58:34 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575859

After NIE revelations, what did Bush know and when did he know it? Posted December 5th, 2007 at 2:15 pm It’s not just that the president’s account on when he learned about the contents of the NIE on Iran don’t add up, it’s that his version of events is laughably ridiculous. It’s no wonder the White House doesn’t want to talk about it. To briefly recap, on Monday, the Bush administration released the conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which said Iran dropped its nuclear-weapons program more than four years ago, contradicting months of escalating White House rhetoric. Yesterday, the president said he was told about “new information” about Iran in August during a briefing by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell. NSA Stephen Hadley said Bush was told, at that meeting, to “stand down” on Iranian threats, direction the president chose to ignore, making multiple overheated references to “World War III.” So, what was Bush told about Iran in August? The president said yesterday that McConnell “didn’t tell me what the information was,” so he didn’t know to dial down the bluster. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke for many when he called that explanation “unbelievable.” “Are you telling me a president that’s briefed every single morning, who’s fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the U.S. government said they had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in ‘03?” Biden asked in a conference call with reporters. “I refuse to believe that,” he added. “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.” On MSNBC this morning, Joe Scarborough was even more blunt: “We are left with only two options here. Either the President of the United States is lying to the American people about what happened during that meeting, or the President of the United States is stupid.” (I wouldn’t be too quick to characterize this as an either/or proposition.) Given that Bush’s comments are embarrassingly incoherent, the White House is apparently reluctant to explain the unexplainable.