So, what's it going to be, George?

Bush is either the dumbest president in US history or he's an incredible liar. The White House press conference this morning contained some interesting stuff. On one hand we have Bush telling everyone that he wasn't aware of the contents of the NIE on Iran until last Tuesday.

At a press briefing this morning, President Bush said he was told by his Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell “in August” that “we have some new information” regarding Iran’s nuclear program. But Bush asserted “he didn’t tell me what the information was”:

BUSH: I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was John — 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.

Later, when a reporter followed-up on this statement, Bush asserted no one ever told him to stop ratcheting up the rhetoric against Iran:

REPORTER: Are you saying at no point while the rhetoric was escalating, as World War III was making it into conversation — at no point, nobody from your intelligence team or your administration was saying, Maybe you want to back it down a little bit?

BUSH: No — I’ve never — nobody ever told me that.

This is the Bush defence for the outrageous rhetoric intended to convince the American public and the world that there was a need for a military strike on Iran. At this point though, it makes Bush look like little more than a clueless buffoon. Is he the president or isn't he?

To recap: At the same time Bush was ratcheting up the rhetoric on Iran, he was told by his National Intelligence Director that that have “some new information.” Yet Bush wants the public to believe he never learned what the information was, nor was he interested.

That's more than a little hard to believe and Josh Marshall calls immediate bullshit, noting that Bush has been changing the terms of his rhetoric on Iran because he had to be aware that the NIE was going to crush his case for attacking Iran.

[W]hen you look back at his speeches, there's evidence that the president was shifting his terms because he knew that the intelligence on which his push for war was based was likely too collapse.

If you go back to his October 17th press conference, the one where he spoke of 'World War III' he changes his wording. It's no longer the need to prevent the Iranians from getting the bomb. Now it's the necessity of "preventing them from hav[ing] the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

That's the tell.

That change is no accident. He wants claims that will survive the eventual revelation of this new intelligence -- while also continuing to hype the imminence of the Iranian nuclear threat that his spy chiefs are telling him likely does not exist.

So, the rhetoric will probably continue and increase as Bush now tries to sell the idea that Iran needs to be bombed because they possess the knowledge necessary to create a nuclear weapon. He (on Cheney's orders) would bomb them because of what they know.

So, despite what Bush says about when he finally got the information in the NIE, there is already an indication that he was aware of its contents before October 17th.

Back on November 10th Gareth Porter wrote an article which I linked to describing the delay in releasing the NIE. In it he described the fight between Cheney, who wants desperately to attack Iran, and the intelligence community which refused to alter the findings or material. In fact, Porter pointed out that there had already been casualties in Cheney's campaign to attack Iran.

Cheney's desire for a "clean" NIE that could be used to support his aggressive policy toward Iran was apparently a major factor in the replacement of John Negroponte as director of national intelligence in early 2007. Negroponte had angered neo-conservatives in the administration by telling the press in April 2006 that the intelligence community believed that it would still be "a number of years off" before Iran would be "likely to have enough fissile material to assemble into or to put into a nuclear weapon, perhaps into the next decade".

If Negroponte knew that, and stated it publicly, Bush also had to know. The pounding of the war drums continued however and the pattern of rhetoric appeared to be a carbon copy of the model employed by Bush and Cheney to attack Iraq. The problem this time, however is that there was a comprehensive intelligence estimate that would expose the Bush/Cheney claims as fraudulent.

The contention in Porter's article, and Negroponte's statement of 19 months ago, is supported today by Scott Horton in Harper's Magazine. Again, there is a stunned disbelief that Bush and Cheney continued to push for an attack on Iran despite being in possession of good intelligence that ran counter to their claims of Iran's nuclear capability and ambitions.

Ken Silverstein and I have been pointing for the better part of the year to the very strange goings-on surrounding the preparation and issuance of a vital intelligence report on the state of Iran’s nuclear project. The White House, and particularly Vice President Cheney, has been feverishly attempting to stop its issuance. The Director of National Intelligence, McConnell, has been at odds to oppose its declassification. In sum, something was there and the war party was intensely upset about it.

[...]

National Security Advisor Steve Hadley appeared this afternoon to answer questions about the NIE and to offer remarks. Hadley has never been a particularly effective figure at press gatherings of this sort, and today was a very weak showing even by Hadley’s standards. But the key question came right off the bat: What should we think about the fact that as recently as October 17, President Bush was giving public remarks in which he pointed to the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran as World War III on the horizon? Indeed, a quick check shows the mushroom cloud analogy, which we all so closely associate with the irrepressibly irresponsible Condoleezza Rice, flowing from the lips of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Rice and Director of National Intelligence McConnell–with increased frequency since the post-Labor Day “roll out.” Hadley responded by saying that the NIE was only completed in the last two weeks and it rests on “new intelligence”–presumably newer than October 17–which pushed the analysts over the line and caused them to close their judgments on the issue.

Is this true? That will be a subject for further study. But one highly reliable intelligence community source I consulted immediately after Hadley spoke answered my question this way: “This is absolutely absurd. The NIE has been in substantially the form in which it was finally submitted for more than six months. The White House, and particularly Vice President Cheney, used every trick in the book to stop it from being finalized and issued. There was no last minute breakthrough that caused the issuance of the assessment.” So what, I asked, if not an intelligence breakthrough, what caused the last-minute change and the sudden issuance of the summary of the NIE? My source had no idea. He speculated, however, that a hardening of attitudes within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the intelligence community, and in Israel against the plans for an air war in Iran had caused Cheney and his team to fold their cards. “But I’d leave that with a final note of caution,” the source added, “Cheney sometimes appears to give up, but he’s a tenacious son-of-a-bitch. He may very well be back at it tomorrow.”

In case anyone missed the obvious, this has always been a Cheney push and Cheney, between defibrillator sessions, is really the one in charge.

I suspect Cheney will indeed be back pounding the "Iran must be dealt with" drum very soon. And the push to bomb Iran will find itself back on the stage in short order.

But the question is, if there is no active nuclear program in Iran, what precisely are they going to bomb? If knowledge is the threat that would suggest the target might be a university.