White House’s NIE story unravels even more

December 6, 2007

In the wake of a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iran stopped its nuclear-weapons program in 2003, the White House story on what Bush knew when has been burdened by contradictions and apparent falsehoods. Yesterday, it got slightly worse.

To briefly recap, the president said on Tuesday that he learned about the NIE conclusions “last week,” though he’d been told by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell that there was “new information” about Iran’s capabilities “in August.” What was that new information? Bush said McConnell “didn’t tell me what that information was.” (A day prior, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley told reporters that the president was told in August to “stand down” on rhetoric towards Iran, advice Bush ignored.)

Yesterday, the White House’s story changed.

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.

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.

Of course it contradicts Bush’s version. On Tuesday, the White House line was that Bush wasn’t given any sense of what the latest Iranian intelligence said. On Wednesday, the White House line was that Bush was told the latest Iranian intelligence suggested Iran’s nuclear program might not exist.

The president is stuck in a lie he can’t get out of.

Indeed, let’s also not lose sight of what Bush did with the information he learned in August. The president’s DNI told him that Iran may not have a nuclear-weapons program, his NSA told him to “stand down,” and Bush proceeded to raise the rhetorical temperature anyway, suggesting more than once that Iran may be inviting “World War III.”

In other words, Bush failed to take his August briefing seriously, and then failed to tell the truth about the August briefing itself.

For that matter, intelligence officials are incredulous about the president’s ridiculous spin.

Four former CIA officials who provided intelligence information to past presidents described as preposterous President Bush’s claim that he was unaware until very recently that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Melvin Goodman, who worked for the CIA from 1966 to 1990 and now is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. […]

[Ray McGovern, a former CIA official who gave daily intelligence briefings to George H. W. Bush while he was vice president, said,] “The notion that the head of National Intelligence whispered in Bush’s ear ‘I’ve got a surprise for you and it’s really important, but I’m not going to tell you about it until we check it out’ — The whole thing is preposterous,” he said in an interview with The Huffington Post.

[Bruce Riedel, who spent over two decades at both the CIA and National Security Council and is the former National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asian Affairs] agreed, saying “the president either chose to ignore what he heard or his director of national intelligence is not doing his job.” Riedel said he doubted McConnell failed to “do his part of the bargain.”

“To me it is almost mind boggling that the President is told by the DNI that we have new important information on Iran and he doesn’t ask ‘what is that information?'” said Riedel, who is now a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center For Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

And just to drive the point home, Dan Froomkin took a closer look at presidential rhetoric and found that Bush “changed the way he talked about Iran in August: He stopped making explicit assertions about the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.” If the president hadn’t been given a fairly detailed briefing, he probably wouldn’t have bothered.

Bush is in an untenable position. If he tells the truth now, he’ll be effectively conceding that he misled the nation about the Iranian threat. If the president sticks to his story, he looks like a hapless fool, easily contradicted by common sense.

Stay tuned.

Bush is in an untenable position. If he tells the truth now, he’ll be effectively conceding that he misled the nation about the Iranian threat. If the president sticks to his story, he looks like a hapless fool, easily contradicted by common sense.

This is a perfectly tenable position for The Deciderator. He’s been in it since at least Sept. 11, 2001 and has shown no signs of discomfort.

Repeat after me: Bush is a liar. He knows he’s a liar. He thinks it’s hilarious that he can lie and no one can do a thing about it.

(I hope the firewall/spambuster thingee is fixed.)

  • Bush is in an untenable position. If he tells the truth now, …

    But Bush’s Press Secretary has already told the truth (finally). So the cat is out of the bag.


  • “In other words, Bush failed to take his August briefing seriously, and then failed to tell the truth about the August briefing itself”

    Not taking an August briefing seriously? That sounds familiar. Wonder if he told McConnell “All right, you’ve covered your ass, now”.

  • You’ve heard of “scandal fatigue”? I’m getting a serious case of “lie fatigue”.

    Is there anything these turds will NOT lie about??

  • This comes as no surprise, the man has been bending the truth for the last 7 years so why it be any different now

  • The good news is that the release of NIE will make it politically impossible for Bush to take military action against Iran before we get rid of him in January 2008.

    What I can’t understand is how this NIE got released to the public. Bush and Cheney must be furious at someone. Whoever released it, obviously in opposition to executive orders, deserves a medal.

    But not the Medal of Freedom. That has been so cheapened by the likes of Henry Hyde and Paul Bremer that it’s no longer worth having.

  • All this he said/she said/ they said rhetoric is just too much for my befuddled brain. And on top of that there is when this or that was said. I can’t keep up all these timelines and who said what. So I have adopted my own philosophy in my World According to Bush. That is KISS – Keep it Simple Stupid. So whenever Bush says anything, I simply assume he is lying. It sure saves wear and tear on my poor brain.

  • I distinctly remember the president changing the rhetoric in his statements and speeches late this summer. He went from talking about the Iranians needing to end their nuclear program to preventing the Iranians from having the knowledge necessary to make nuclear weapons.

    I remember it because I could not, for the life of me, understand how we would prevent people from having knowledge. In fact, there were only two ways I could think of to accomplish that: lobotomize anyone in Iran with a scientific background, or put them all in solitary confinement in a prison somewhere and deny them any contact with people, reading and writing material, and subject them to severe psychological torture to erase whatever was in their heads to begin with. But then I thought, “wait – we don’t torture, so that could never happen).

    And then, I started to worry about what it means when the president takes a position that if you can think, you might be dangerous, and that what is in someone’s head is reason enough to go to war against their country, or to imprison them. .

    On that basis, Bush is pretty much safe, but not so much for the rest of us.

  • His remaining supporters aren’t smart enough to figure it out so I don’t think it really matters. I watched a few minutes of O’Reilly last night and the FoxNews line seems to be that the NIE is a lie that will get us all killed by the evil Iranians just so the intelligence community can embarrass Fearless Leader. It made no sense, but right-wing propaganda rarely does.

  • Wow. Just, wow.

    I really have nothing to say. I can’t even summon up the disgust anymore.

    But impeachment is and has been off the table. Way to go Dems, just let this man, and Cheney, continue to have the resources of the US government at their disposal and beck and call. Smart move, that.

    Just. Wow.

  • Bush is in an untenable position.

    I don’t see it. Oh sure, keeping up the lie makes him look like “a hapless fool, easily contradicted by common sense.” But that hasn’t ever stopped him before.

    His tactic will be: stonewall as long as possible. Eventually the press will move on to the next shiny object and he’ll move on to the next outrageous lie.

    It may not work this time – not because the press is any better than it has been, but because we’re in the middle of an election season. And while the GOP candidates have no reason to make hay out of this, the Dems do – especially as long as Clinton remains in the race. We’ll see if that makes a difference next time.

  • The Decider made a Decision on Iran. Period. No one can do anything about it.

    Remember – this is a time of war. Thus if the Decider acts, such action is Legal, appropriate and Just.

  • Bush: “So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

    Great catch by Josh Marshall… so Bush want to bomb their knowledge? How do you do that, maybe destroy their internets?

    Looking back at the shift in rhetoric to “knowledge”, it reminds me of Iraq, and how the shift went from “WMD stockpiles” to “WMD-related program activities”.

  • The president is stuck in a lie he can’t get out of.

    You have far too much faith in the media, and dare I say the American Public.
    You only have to “get out of” the lie if anyone cares that you are in it.

    Maybe the media and public should or would care about a huge and dangerous lie about nuclear Iran. . . hang on, Ellen and Jenna are calling the White House on live TV! This is soooo cute! I just have to watch!

    Now, what was that you were saying? Oh, nevermind, lets go Christmas shopping.

  • CB, why do we have to choose between lying to the American public and hapless fool? We can have it both ways: he’s a lying fool, always has been, always will be.

    I like Nell’s idea, except that Bush is such a petulant child that he’d go ahead and bomb Iran just to show them they can’t ignore him.

  • If Bush’s mouth is moving he’s lying. No one in the reality based world believes a word he says, but the great propaganda machine behaves as if its words have credibility, which they don’t. In Soviet times Pravda (which means ‘truth’ in Russian) spit out the part line, but many intelligent Russians learned how to interpret the nonsense it printed to get the real story. Usually that meant just the opposite of what Pravda said. And so it is here. The shrinking ‘base’ believes him and Faux News. The rest of us know we’re being constantly diddled.

  • Isn’t it, or shouldn’t it be, against the law for a president to lie to the American people? What? Oh, well don’t the reporters in DC investigate and tell us the truth? What? Really? They actually do that to his backside? Wow! Well how about Congress? Don’t they have lots of committees that look in to this stuff? You’re kidding. What were their names, Roberts, Specter, etc? But I thought the Democrats were in charge now, right? Unreal, Lieberman and Feinstein, huh? Well, this NIE thing should turn the tide, right? Conspiracy against the president? Golly, this guy is slippery. Well, back to making sentences with my Alphabits.

  • This morning on NPR Stephen Hadley made it sound as if it was Curious George who made them investigate further – they gave him the run-down in August of some changes and he said they should check into it.

    Because, you know, he’s known for his curiosity…

  • Bush is in an untenable position.

    No, Bush’s position is pretty much unchanged. It’s the country that is in an untenable position, with a transparent, very foolish liar having nearly dictatorial powers, and the countervailing forces that are supposed to keep that liar in check are either co-opted (most of the media, all GOP Senators and congresspeople, SCOTUS) or supine (Democratic Sentators and congresspeople).

    You have far too much faith in the media, and dare I say the American Public.

    Actually I don’t agree with this. Bush didn’t get to 30% approval because people trust his word. Bush is still able to seemingly dominate public discourse because we’ve produced a bizarre capitalistic version of the old Soviet state-controlled press.

  • What jimBOB said, plus what zeitgeist said.

    This lie won’t hurt Bush because the US media sucks ass, and because the American people don’t give a shit that the media sucks ass.

    Given these truths, we are totally screwed. The gullible masses will buy any worthless brand of crap, and we are going to pay the price. Big time. They may be sour on Bush’s brand of crap right now, but they’re still the same idiots they were when they bought it (twice), and the media is still the pile of shit it was then if not moreso.

  • If the president sticks to his story, he looks like a hapless fool, easily contradicted by common sense.

    He is a hapless fool. 82% of the country already knows that.

  • I can only add more outrage to what has already been expressed here many many times about Bush’s lying.

    Many of us have the uneasy suspicion that Bush is a “pathological liar”, which is not the same as the everyday lies we might tell to smooth social relations or protect ourselves from embarrassment. Bush goes WAY beyond these common motivations.

    Pathological lying is more related to a deficient or defective psychological state of the liar than the lies themselves, though they can be very very destructive. There’s no category for “pathological liar” in the DSM, but lying is a characteristic of several personality disorders listed.

    Psychiatric conditions that have been traditionally associated with deception in one form or another include Malingering, Confabulation, Ganser’s Syndrome, Factitious Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Antisocial Personality Disorder. Lying may also occur in Histrionic and Narcissistic Personality Disorders. http://www.jaapl.org/cgi/content/full/33/3/342

    I, personally, believe that Bush lies in service to some “wish psychosis”, which just means that his statements are always supportive of what he wants or his literal self-centered world-view and are only tenuously connected to the external reality whence these “wishes” arise.

    Be all this as may be, eight years of being lied to by a psychologically-deficient president has been very close to intolerable. I think we can never expect him to tell the truth about anything except by accident. But each one must tirelessly be exposed so they don’t take us into destruction.

  • “The president is stuck in a lie he can’t get out of.”

    Yes, he can unfortunately. Remember, this is America. Who remembers Tuesday’s (or even last night’s) TeeVee news broadcast? In one eye, out the other. Never a rest stop at the frontal lobes. There are no old-fashioned newspapers, certainly no news magazines or (god forbid) books hanging around to remind Americans of things like the lies of politicians. No party machinery independent of corporations to remind us of our ideological differences from “the other party”. Remember how Pelosi and Reid were going to fix things?

    And anyway, we’re too busy Christmas shopping. And then there’s New Year’s and the January White Sales. And after that….

  • ***What I can’t understand is how this NIE got released to the public. Bush and Cheney must be furious at someone. Whoever released it, obviously in opposition to executive orders, deserves a medal.***

    How ’bout the Nobel, Okie? Whoever pulled this off might well have just prevented a war, so the Peace Prize should be “on the table….”

  • The naked emperor hears what he wants to hear, sees what he wants to see, he lays down his history to spite the facts, “I hate to have to set you straight folks, but i just heard this last week!”

    And note how Page Hadley immediately leapt to the parapet and rewrote his own quotes, “Thine hast not heard my words correctly, nay, i say, never did i tell the Emperor to stand down.”

    “Indeed!” harrumphs the Emperor, “the danger lies not in what the enemy is doing, we must kill him for what he might do! For this is my Legacy!!! Eye for eye and tooth for tooth NO MORE, we kill at the word of my Sayers of Sooth! We avenge the victims yet to be!”

  • Re: “The president is stuck in a lie he can’t get out of.”

    The answer is, he doesn’t have to. George W. Bush is playing strifdctly to The Base now. Truth, accuracy, or even logic are no longer required, even in pretence.

    Keep in mind, for The Party Faithful, President Bush doesn’t have to “get out of” anything. Conservatives are fully prepared to believe five mutually contradictory items simultaneously, as long as the Bush White House says so.

    Tomorrow President Bush could go on the air and say, “The Moon is made of Green Cheese. And, by the way, The Moon doesn’t exist at all”. And there is not one single “Loyal Bushie” who would not declare their complete and unyielding believe in both, adding that anyone who says otherwise, “Wants the Terrorists to win”.

    And, in the coming weeks, that is essentially what they will do.

  • Re: “Many of us have the uneasy suspicion that Bush is a “pathological liar”,”

    To offer a slightly different conclusion.

    As I mentioned above, George W. Bush may not be a pathological liar, in the sense that he is delusional.

    Another take is that, similar to the analysts who believed that President Bush is unintelligent because he cannot string two coherent sentences togehter into a logical thought when speaking without a script.

    Another take is that George W.Bush simply does not care to take sufficient time to either collect his thoughts when speaking or draw out a logical inference from his collected statements.

    Meaning: President Bush assumes everyone ELSE is stupid, and does not care one bit whether his words make sense or are consistent from day to day.

    And, given the fact that he can count on virtual 100% loyalty from the Republicans in Congress to protect him, that he can count on the Conservative media to tell America how great he is, and that the rest of the media is so lazy and spineless they will never publicly declare how insultingly arrogant his statements are, we can count on another year’s worth of these kind of statements.

    As well as still getting a war with Iran.

  • Philadelphia Steve

    Yes, Bush could be a mental-moral-intellectual-linguistic slob, that’s true. (And others could probably add to the list.) But it isn’t normal behavior for public figures, who presumably enjoy impressing others with some superior characteristic, to publically fail the (fair or unfair) expectations of those they want to be admired by. In Bush’s case, that would seem to mean he can impress only morons. It’s more likely to me that his primary motivation is to be seen as a person with genuine unlimited power over reality itself, but I think that kind of persona requires delusion, even if much of the “reflective” environment around one is self-generated or handpicked, as we all know Bush does.

    In the end, it matters not at all whether his lies are intentional or based on delusion, since he isn’t personally available to anyone for analysis. He just needs to be stopped before he causes even more destruction to America. Why the Democrats in Congress haven’t been doing that all along with the strategies and tricks at their disposal is incomprehensible to me, and I’ve grown weary of trying to roll that boulder uphill..

  • I think the former governor of Texas is a sociopath. That would explain the blithe utterance of a new lie to replace the old one, once the old one is revealed. Sociopaths think that their desires are so important that they should be able to do anything – anything! – to get what they want.

    From Wikipedia:

    Common characteristics of people with antisocial personality disorder include:

    * Persistent lying or stealing
    * Recurring difficulties with the law
    * Tendency to violate the rights and boundaries of others (property, physical, sexual, emotional, legal)
    * Substance abuse
    * Aggressive, often violent behavior; prone to getting involved in fights
    * A persistent agitated or depressed feeling (dysphoria)
    * Inability to tolerate boredom
    * Disregard for the safety of self or others
    * A childhood diagnosis of conduct disorders
    * Lack of remorse for hurting others
    * Superficial charm
    * Impulsiveness
    * A sense of extreme entitlement
    * Inability to make or keep friends
    * Lack of guilt
    * Relentlessness
    * being completely insensitive to pain
    * Recklessness, impulsivity[4][2]

    People who have antisocial personality disorder often experience difficulties with authority figures.[5]

  • Hmmm, well I had posted a long comment. But the system ate it. Here goes again:

    There are two facts that make me think we’re missing some of the story:

    1. Why did the 2005 NIE conclude that Iran’s nuclear program was working hard on nuclear weapons in 2005? Today, they conclude the program stopped in 2003. The two conclusions are contradictory.

    Are we rushing to embrace the 2007 NIE because we can use it as ammunition against Bush’s “WWIII” talk? What evidence is there that it is more reliable than the 2005 NIE?

    2. In fact, there is evidence from the IAEA that Iran has plutonium and weapons-grade uranium that are not normal products of a civilian-only nuclear program:

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15712210/

    Iran is hiding something and its non-cooperation with IAEA inspections is suspicious.

    In the run-up to the Iraq fiasco, the Iraq regime grudgingly allowed IAEA inspections. We now know they had nothing really to hide. Their programs had been thoroughly demolished after the Gulf War.

    Perhaps Iran is playing the same game? Or Iran really has something to hide. We do not have a clear history of Iran’s program the way we did of Iraq’s. To me, that’s deeply troubling.

  • #33 Astrogeek:

    To answer your first question, the faulty 2005 NIE that said Iran was racing to develop nuclear weapons was “written by some of the same team that had produced key parts of the flawed Iraq estimate.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/washington/05intel.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1196859659-rn+YPGGSkaWRXm0o82F7qA

    Also, the “starkly different view of Iran’s nuclear program that emerged from U.S. spy agencies this week” drew lessons from the “intelligence debacle over supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.”

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/04/AR2007120402408.html?wpisrc=newsletter

  • #33 Astrogeek:

    On your second question, “Specifically, the IAEA said in a report in September 2007 that questions over Iranian experiments with plutonium and the presence of high-enriched uranium particles were resolved.”

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4031603.stm

    So both your questions are answered. You shouldn’t be “deeply troubled” anymore. Instead, I would suggest calling your Congressman and support a permanent worldwide nuclear ban.

  • It’s as if Barb Bush had been on the phone last night from Houston rasping at Dubya (after tossing down a couple tumblers of Jack Daniels), “I don’t want the American people to think I raised a motherf*cking, sh*t for brains, goddamned idiot…now you go out there and make it perfectly clear they understand you were just lying…”

    [Pause, clears throat…]

    “…yes, Mom….”

  • And so what? He’s caught in yet another lie, and so what? Nothing will happen: his approval may drop a few more points, but so what?

    There will be no consequences for his lies while he’s in office. No one in Congress will ever do anything about it, so let’s just add this one to the list and move on.

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