Reed Hundt has the latest state of play on the immigration debate.

The Muckrakers lament that they won’t have Howard Kaloogian to kick around anymore — after he managed a feeble fourth place in yesterday’s open primary to succeed Duke Cunningham. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

Actually, just kidding. Here’s a photo from Howard’s victory celebration.

Hotline: RNC funds phone-jammer’s legal defense out of generosity of spirit.

Okay, aside from the bamboozlement on Iran talk, I think I’ve found the real gem in Scott McClellan’s comments today in the gaggle.

You probably saw the Post piece today that says the DIA had decided definitievely that those ‘mobile labs’ trailers were not for bio-weapons a couple days before the president went before the public and presented them as the conclusive evidence that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. McClellan seems to imply that the president and the White House is so fastidious about the proprieties of declassification that the president wasn’t at liberty to tell the public that he was lying (emphasis added to main bamboozlement passage) …

I think the CIA will tell you — and I spoke to them earlier today — that a finished product like this, a white paper like this, takes coordination, it takes debating, it takes vetting, and it’s not something that they will tell you turns on a dime. It’s a complex intelligence white paper and it’s … one derived from highly classified information takes a substantial amount of time to coordinate and to run through a declassification process. And they will tell you this. And the intelligence comes in many different forms
— human intelligence, signals intelligence, open source — and it’s not a trickle, it’s a constant flood, is what they told me this morning. And weighing and assessing it is something that takes a lot of time and is a technology-intensive process. So you’re making an assumption that something is immediately taken and assessed by your comments.

You can see the rest of what he said this morning here.

(ed.note: Fred Hiatt take note — this delay related to declassification angle might be good material for a future Post editorial.)

Okay, we may not be able to stop or counter the cresting wave of Iran nuclear bamboozlement. But we can at least give you the play-by-play along with color commentary that we can refer back to when we’re discussing possible Iran disengagement strategies in 2010.

Here’s a gem just out from Bloomberg, courtesy of TPM Reader TB.

Headline: “Iran Could Produce Nuclear Bomb in 16 Days, U.S. Says”

And the first couple grafs …

Iran, which is defying United Nations Security Council demands to cease its nuclear program, may be capable of making a nuclear bomb within 16 days if it goes ahead with plans to install thousands of centrifuges at its Natanz plant, a U.S. State Department official said.

“Natanz was constructed to house 50,000 centrifuges,” Stephen Rademaker, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, told reporters today in Moscow. “Using those 50,000 centrifuges they could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days.”

Now, I’m pretty new to this issue. But even I can spot that Stephen Rademaker works for Robert Joseph. And that’s the same Bob Joseph who was charged with muscling the CIA into letting President Bush use the Niger bamboozle in the 2003 State of the Union address. And he actually managed to get it done, even after the Alan Foley and others at the CIA told him repeatedly they didn’t think it was true. So he certainly speaks with a lot of credibility on this issue.

Like I said, we may not be able to stop our march toward destruction. But we can at least have some fun with it as we swirl down history’s drain.

I guess the folks at the Pentagon didn’t get the Pentagon memo on the phony bio-labs either.

Here’s another question on those bio-weapons mobile trailers that never were.

When did the administration let Congress in on the fact that those mobile weapons labs weren’t bio-weapons labs at all and that we’d just been conned by some emigres on the make?

We’re focusing now on the president’s flogging of this bogus story shortly after the Defense Intelligence Agency gave a definitive verdict on the falsity of the claim. But when did they tell Congress? And how late did other administration heavies continue to make this claim?

My recollection is that with most of these stories like the trailers and the tubes and the nuclear this and that, most of this stuff wasn’t definitively knocked down for many, many months after the war. Like old soldiers these fables didn’t die so much as they faded away. The certainty diminished. More doubts were raised. But for what always struck me as deeply cynical reasons, the White House never publicly pulled the plug on any of these tales because as long as they kept some level of uncertainty hanging in the air they didn’t have to address the fact that the central argument for the war had turned out to be false.

Hell, you’ve still got Hitchens publicly holding out for the Niger canard. And that’s just an example of the fact that you can always find folks deep enough in the tank to churn out tall tales for the true believers to eat up.

Anyway, when did the White House tell Congress that the mobile weapons story was bunk?

A reader pointed me toward this portion of the congressional record from July 17th, 2003 in which Senators Durbin and McConnell discuss then heated WMD debate. They both discuss the mobile bio-weapons trailers with the assumption that that was what they were. And this was the day after then CIA Director George Tenet gave five hours of closed door Senate testimony on the WMD debacle. That certainly suggests that Tenet didn’t knock down the mobile lab fable in that lengthy session dedicated to the topic of pre-war WMD intelligence.

What does Durbin say?

And how late were administration figures pushing the mobile bio-labs story?

Here’s what Vice President Cheney said to Juan Williams on January 24th 2004 …

In terms of the question what is there now, we know for example that prior to our going in that he had spent time and effort acquiring mobile biological weapons labs, and we’re quite confident he did, in fact, have such a program. We’ve found a couple of semi trailers at this point which we believe were, in fact, part of that program. Now it’s not clear at this stage whether or not he used any of that to produce or whether he was simply getting ready for the next war. That, in my mind, is a serious danger in the hands of a man like Saddam Hussein, and I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did, in fact, have programs for weapons of mass destruction.

Cheney’s persistence in lying to the public about al Qaida and WMD claims is almost the stuff of legend. So even though the baldness of this lie still sort of grabs me, I can’t say it’s exactly shocking.

But again, Congress. For how many months did the White House continue to tell the Congress that the mobile bio-weapons story was true even while they knew it was false? For months? Or was it more like a year?

Tom DeLay may get a job at the White House. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL) denies everything in new DeLay-Buckham earmark back scratch imbroglio.

Liddy Dole tries new spin on GOP meme: Dems can’t beat Republicans on the issues so they have to rely on inexpensive advertising rates in Montana!

Liddy on Dems targetting Sen. Conrad Burns: “This is very unfair, it’s very offensive, I think it’s outrageous. But, you see, they can’t beat him on the issues and ideas, so they’re trying to put all this money in here because advertising is inexpensive.”