I wrote yesterday about the release of the NIE on Iran and the President’s press conference Tuesday morning. Neither event, truthfully, was particularly pleasant. Neither has had much play in the press, that I’ve seen. (Blogosphere, yes. Media, no.)
Naturally, I wondered what Keith Olbermann would make of the release of the NIE and the President’s insistence that he didn’t know until last week that Iran had suspended their nuclear program four years ago.
The two money paragraphs:
We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole — or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked — at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so — whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.
A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency: an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.
Olbermann is brutal. Olbermann is unrelenting.
He calls the President “a bald-faced liar.”
It’s worth checking out.
Okay, I did a bit more digging and found that the German authorities were investigating shipments made in 2001 and 2002 – well within the timeframe of Iran’s nuclear program.
However, the last page of the 2007 NIE mentions differences with the 2005 estimate. This 2005 statement particularly stands out:
“Assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that Iran is immovable.”
If Tehran showed no sign of renewing their efforts in 2003, then why was this statement made in 2005?