To think, if we'd listened to all the FOX pundits and the likes of Joe Leiberman for the better part of the year demanding war ASAP and trying to scare up images of WWIII, we'd be at war right now over bad intel once again.

It was a year ago this month that Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker that the White House (ie: Cheney) was pushing back against the release of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that had failed to find any evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program. Once again I guess you could say Sy is the polar opposite of ‘the boy who cried wolf’.’

Wolf Blitzer had him on to discuss it and what to make of the new NIE and the recent claims by the President that he was just informed about it’s contents a week ago.



 Quote:
Hersh: What’s interesting here is the President’s position. As you know today in his news conference he said he only learned about this the other week.

Blitzer: He said he only got the word from Mike McConnell, the National Intelligence Director, last week that there was in fact now a new the National Intelligence Estimate, although last Aug he was told there is some new information - we haven’t vetted it - it’s not yet confirmed - there may be some new information. He only says that he learned about the new NIE last week.

Hersh: Look, it’s a lose-lose for them. Either he did know what was going on at the highest levels - the fight I’m talking about began last year. I was writing about something in November and also you mentioned earlier. They were aware of a big dispute inside the community that is between the White House and the community about this. Now, maybe he didn’t know what was going on at the Vice Presidential level about something that serious. If so, I mean, we pay him to know these things and not to make statements based on information that turns out not to be accurate, or else he is misrepresenting what he knows. I don’t think there is any question this is going to pose a serious credibility problem. I assume people are going to be asking more and more questions about what did he know, when. …


It’s little wonder why Seymour Hersh is so often the target of fierce criticism from The Administration as he’s been a thorn in their side just as he has many an administration before them. Sy has earned his place as one of the US’s greatest investigative reporters/muckrakers ever after his exposing many of the greatest scandals of our time. He broke the My Lai massacre, the torture at Abu Ghraib, and the CIA’s “Family Jewels” which was Nixon wiretapping journalists, dissidents and antiwar protesters, that led to the Church hearings which in turn led to th FISA law, and even Clinton’s bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, just to name a few of his more well known exposes.

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, the White House’s story changed.

 Quote:
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.