Situation in Iraq

During the White House press briefing today, Press Secretary Dana Perino attempted to defend President Bush’s lie about when he first learned that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program.

Recall, Bush originally stated that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell came to him in August “and said, ‘We have some new information.’ He didn’t tell me what the information was.” But last night, Perino conceded he was told that Iran’s program “may be suspended.”

White House reporters repeatedly confronted Perino about this discrepancy in the press briefing this afternoon. Perino tried to claim that when Bush said he didn’t know what the information was, he actually meant, “he didn’t get any of the details of what — what the information was, in terms of what the actual raw intelligence was.” When reporters pressed her on this, an exasperated Perino said:

OK, look. I can see where you could see that the president could have been more precise in that language. But the president was being truthful.

Watch it:

During the briefing, Perino was also asked about the timeline of when Bush was briefed on the NIE. As ThinkProgress reported earlier this week, The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh said that Bush spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert about the NIE on Monday, Nov. 26.

CNN’s Ed Henry asked Perino: “How could he brief Olmert on Monday about a report that he found out about on Wednesday?” Perino responded, “I don’t — I will check. I mean, it’s possible that he knew that there was information coming.”

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Transcript: (more…)

Former White House adviser Karl Rove is “shopping a memoir in an auction that will kick off today and likely result in a seven-figure payday. How much Rove’s memoir will go for is still unclear, but one publisher predicted $3 million. Ashbel Green, a senior editor at Alfred A Knopf, said that Rove lacks the “personality” to fetch “the multimillion-dollar contracts of former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan or former President Bill Clinton.”

On Tuesday night, when former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) was asked what he thought of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, he said that he had neither “been briefed” on nor “heard of the finding” that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Not much has changed apparently. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning, Huckabee tried to dismiss criticism of his “ignorance of the news of the day” with a joke, but only managed to compound his cluelessness:

SHUSTER: But it gets to the idea that being governor of Arkansas is not necessarily best sort of foreign policy experience and that something that I think a lot of your critics are aiming at your direction. How do you respond to them?

HUCKABEE: Well, I don’t blame my staff. It is a situation where a report was released at 10:00 in the morning, the president hadn’t seen it in four years and I’m supposed to see it four hours later.

Huckabee then called it “a gotcha question” at a dinner full of reporters. Watch it:

In his attempt at a humor-driven dismissal, Huckabee revealed he still doesn’t know much about the NIE.

1) The NIE was released the previous day, not that morning. The NIE was released to the public in the early afternoon on Monday, December 3rd. The dinner where Huckabee was asked about the NIE took place on the evening of Tuesday, Decemeber 4th.

2) Huckabee had more than “four hours.” According to the timeline above, Huckabee could have learned about the NIE anytime overnight or during the course of the next day if he had picked up a newspaper. Hotline notes, on the same day Huckabee said he hadn’t heard of it, the Iran NIE “not only dominated the Democrats’ debate here in town but also prompted a presidential press conference in response.”

3) Bush couldn’t have seen the report “four years” ago. The NIE was initially completed only a year ago, thus Bush couldn’t have had “four years” to see the report. While the intelligence community did eventually learn that Iran shut down its nuclear program four years ago, that knowledge didn’t come to the intelligence community until this past summer.

So, in one sentence, a confused Huckabee managed to compound his cluelessness over the NIE and confirmed once again his “ignorance of the news of the day.”

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Following an objection by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), a vote has been postponed on “contempt resolutions against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former presidential political guru Karl Rove for failing to respond to subpoenas” regarding the U.S. attorney scandal. Specter, who asked Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) for a chance to “revise the draft resoltions, warned that the whole matter could end in federal court.”

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According to Haaretz, Israel has known about the Iran NIE “for more than a month. The first information on it was passed on to Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and to Shaul Mofaz, who is the minister responsible for the strategic dialog with the Americans. The issue was also discussed at the Annapolis summit by Barak and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and it seems also between Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.” But Bush claims he didn’t get briefed on the NIE until last Wednesday.

This week Joe Klein authors Time’s front cover story on Iran, titled, “Iran’s Nukes: Now They Tell Us,” in reference to the recent intelligence revelations that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Today on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Klein cheered President Bush’s response to the NIE, stating that it was “an amazing moment of candor by the United States”:

The Bush reaction to this — he didn’t try to block it. He didn’t try to postpone it. He didn’t spend weeks, he didn’t ask the intelligence community ‘give me a couple of weeks, let’s see if we can figure out some kind of negotiating initiative or some way to respond to this.’ He didn’t try to spin it to our advantage. This is an amazing moment of candor by the United States.

Watch it:

Contrary to Klein’s assertion that the White House “didn’t try to block it,” the NIE was completed a year ago but stalled by the White House in an effort to “make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran.”

Moreover, the White House confirmed that Bush lied to the public, as he was told in August that Iran’s nuclear weapons program “may be suspended.” (Bush previously said he was never told what information the intelligence community possessed.) A skeptical Joe Scarborough responded to Klein’s cheerleading for the administration, stating, “Well that’s one way to look at it,” then explained that Bush continued to warn of World War III with Iran despite knowing better. Klein chuckled, “There is that…”

In Joe Klein’s world, once White House deception and deceit is revealed to the public, it becomes “amazing candor.”

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Atrios reminds us that it was “just one year ago today that the Iraq Study Group report was released. What would we do without bipartisan commissions of elder Villagers to save us? Or a media to tell us what it all means. Approximately 980 US troops have been killed since the world-changing report was released.”

View key recommendations of the ISG report HERE.

Gracing the Washington Post’s opinion page today are two former Bush administration officials, two movement conservatives and a journalist-turned-columnist warning that “47 million uninsured” isn’t “our biggest health-care problem.” Hardly anyone’s idea of balance. Here’s how the page is advertised on the frontpage of the Post’s website:

Today, President Bush will announce a freeze on some subprime mortgages in an effort to stop a wave of foreclosures. Bloomberg writes, “Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s success in crafting agreement on a five-year fix of subprime mortgage rates owes a debt to an unlikely source: congressional Democrats.” Atrios has more. The NIE’s conclusion that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program came about after intelligence agencies obtained notes last summer of Iranian military officials complaining “bitterly” about the “decision by their superiors in late 2003 to shut down” a central part of the program. One in three Americans “want to deny social services, including public schooling and emergency room healthcare,” to undocumented immigrants, according to a LAT/Bloomberg poll. However, 60 percent still favor creating a pathway to citizenship for law-abiding individuals.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) yesterday took offense at being described as a “puppet” of President Bush by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). Jim Manley, a Reid spokesman, “said it’s understandable that Republicans are sensitive about being associated with Bush.” The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday blocked a Bush administration rule under the “Healthy Forests Initiative” that “allowed logging and burning projects in national forests without first analyzing their effects on the environment.” (more…)

On Tuesday, President Bush said he was never forewarned by the intelligence community that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003:

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.

Now the White House is revealing that wasn’t true. In fact, Bush did know what the information was. CNN reports:

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.”

The White House statement released by Dana Perino tonight also states McConnell told Bush “the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran’s covert nuclear program.”

On Tuesday, Bush said “nobody ever told me” to back down from his hawkish rhetoric on Iran. No, maybe not. But Bush knew Iran “may have suspended” its nuclear weapons program and that the intelligence community was in the process of “changing its assessment.” And yet, he continued to warn of “World War III” and a “nuclear holocaust” because nobody told him specifically to stop.

UPDATE: Dan Froomkin reported today that Bush deceptively “changed the way he talked about Iran” starting in August. “Instead of directly condemning Iranian leaders for pursuing nuclear weapons, he started more vaguely accusing them of seeking the knowledge necessary to make such a weapon. Even as he did that, however, he and the vice president accelerated their rhetorical efforts to persuade the public that the nuclear threat posed by Iran was grave and urgent.”

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