A Pattern of Deception
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, December 5, 2007; 2:27 PM
...a close examination of his word choice over the past year suggests that he learned something around August that got him to stop making claims that were apparently no longer supported by American intelligence.
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. Bush went so far in late August and October as to warn of the potential for a nuclear holocaust.
Indeed, a careful parsing of Bush's words indicates that,
while not saying anything that could later prove to be demonstrably false, Bush left his listeners with what he likely knew was a fundamentally false impression. And he did so in the pursuit of a more muscular and possibly even military approach to a Middle Eastern country. It's an oddly familiar pattern of deception.
more at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/12/05/BL2007120501703.html..............
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
Report: Israeli Defense Officials Knew At Least a Month Ago About NIE Findings, Weeks Before Bush Claims He Was InformedMark Karlin, Editor and Publisher, BuzzFlash.com
December 6, 2007
According to the authoritative Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, "Israel has known about the report 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."
To say the least,
this would put Bush in the unexplainable position of claiming he just found out about the NIE, while his administration had told the Israelis weeks ago that the Iranian nuclear bomb program was stopped in 2003. In short, Bush is basically wanting us to believe that he was the last to know about this "bombshell" intelligence finding.Furthermore, the one mainstream media company that regularly seeks out the story behind the story (McClatchy Newspapers), reported this story on Nov. 4: "Experts: No firm evidence of Iranian nuclear weapons."
Yet,
Bush would have us believe a diligent newspaper reporter knew about the NIE findings before he did.more at:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/articles/editorblog/017..................
From Harpers:
..........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.” more at:
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/12/hbc-90001837
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