State Department pays bonuses to officials who oversaw Blackwater’s Iraq contract.
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Joe Biden, on the President’s line that he wasn’t briefed on the new Iran NIE until last week:
âAre you telling me a president who is briefed every single morning, who is fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the United States government said they had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in â03?â Biden said in a conference call with reporters.
âThatâs not believable,â Biden added. âI refuse to believe that. If thatâs true, he has the most incompetent staff in ⦠modern American history and heâs one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.â
Give Blitzer his due: He’s ripping serial bamboozler John Bolton a new one at the moment on Situation Room.
Actually, maybe rubbing him a new one. Didn’t quite knock back all the crap. But it wasn’t bad.
If you look closely at what President Bush said this morning about the Iran intelligence, his dodge about what he knew and when is actually worse than the charge he was trying to deny.
The essence of what President Bush was saying was that whatever chatter he may have heard last summer, he didn’t hear the key details until this week.
If you take at face value what the president is saying, his spy chief, Mike McConnell, comes in to the president and says, “Mr. President, we’ve got some important new information on the Iran nuclear front.” And the president apparently says, okay. And then he doesn’t ask him what the information was.
“He didn’t tell me what the information was.” Perhaps McConnell is being set up as the ‘slam dunker’, a la Tenet. But is this really the president’s answer? He didn’t think to ask what the new information was?
Watch the video …
In the president’s defense, I don’t think this happened. I think he’s lying. Of course, McConnell told him.
Late Update: Sounds like Joe Biden doesn’t buy it either.
Did the Post let the Prez skate on his Iran intel fib? Horse’s Mouth answers in the affirmative.
From TPM Reader PG:
CNN and MSNBC are rightly wall to wall with Iran NIE news. John Gibson’s Big Story on Fox? Not so much. He’s leading with a hot blonde teacher who was caught sleeping with her students again.
Can we start up that War on Christmas business again?
William Hartung: For neocons, Iran findings mean never having to say you’re sorry.