Larry Johnson: Bush knew of NIE a year ago

If you have read Digby's post yesterday (and which I commented on at Conservative invariably overstate threats to America.) about how the NeoCons always overstate the threat from foreigners and understate the level of American ability to deal with that threat, then you will be able to anticipate the reaction of NeoCons to this new NIE that says Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and is not pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.

You'd be right. Ex-CIA officer Larry describes the great show of shrieking, gnashing of teeth, and rending of clothes that NeoCons are currently making public.

Larry also points out that Bush was briefed on the Iranian nuclear operations a year ago, not last week as he has just said (lied) to public. Here is exactly what Larry wrote:

George Bush tried his moron act again today (i.e., “I didn’t find out about this until last week.”) but this time the turd ain’t floating. The news that Iran ended its nuclear program in 2003 was briefed to George Bush in the Presidential Daily Brief. He has known about this, I am told, for at least one year. George Bush is lying when he insists he had no inkling, until last week, that the intelligence community believed Iran halted its nuke program in 2003.

Larry is stating that his sources inside the Intelligence community have told him this.

Larry Johnson has a much better reputation for honesty and accuracy than George Bush does. Bush, in fact, is a known serial liar. There is no reason to expect that somehow Bush has suddenly decided to change his spots and commit an act of honesty.

Rudy's foreign policy - perpetual war

One of the many shocks I have gotten during the Bush regime has been how often I have found myself agreeing with Pat Buchanan. Pat himself has not changed. Only the circumstances have changed, so that his extremist rhetoric has extremist situations to describe. Here is Pat's description of the foreign policy team that Rudolph Giuliani has created to advise him in what is clearly Giuliani's weakest area of policy and experience:

If Rudy rivals McCain as the hawk’s hawk in the Republican race, the foreign policy advisers he has signed up make the Vulcans of Bush look like Howard Zinn and Ramsey Clark. Arnaud de Borchgrave titled his column about them “Dogs of War.”

Team leader is Charles Hill, a co-signer of the Sept. 20, 2001, neocon ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9-11, warning the president if he did not attack Iraq, his failure to do so “will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender to the war on international terrorism.”

Yet Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11.

A second member of Rudy’s team is Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American who, according to Ken Silverstein of Harper’s, “spent 25 years at Tel Aviv University and whose Middle East policy can best be summarized as, ‘What’s Best for Israel?’” Silverstein calls Rudy’s eight-man advisory group “AIPAC’s Dream Team”—AIPAC being the Israeli lobby, two of whose leaders go on trial in January for espionage against the United States

According to The New York Times, another key Rudy adviser is Daniel Pipes, “who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps.” Another is AEI’s Michael Rubin, “who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassinations.”

Best known of Rudy’s advisers is Norman Podhoretz, who wrote in June, “The Case for Bombing Iran” in Commentary, thinks we are in “World War IV” and writes that “as an American and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart” Bush will bomb Iran. Podhoretz sees us at Munich in 1938 and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Hitler.

“Like Hitler,” writes Podhoretz, Ahmadinejad “is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international order and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.”

Pat ends his article by focusing on the insane Podhoretz and his relationship to Rudy, the candidate, with this statement:

After meeting with his candidate, Podhoretz emerged happy to assure us, “There is very little difference in how he (Rudy) sees the war and I see it.” If true, a vote for Rudy is a vote for endless war.

And, as James Madison said, wars are the death of republics.

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I have taken the liberty of adding some links to explanatory sources to some of the names in Pat's article. Editor, WTF-o