Nukyular Credibility Meltdown

Politics can be confusing but it is fun to watch an issue develop. American intelligence agencies concluded -- probably years ago -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. But the release of the report is new, and comes only a few weeks after White House warnings of World War III.

If our leader did only hear this report last week then there could be a problem in office management. But it appears that the 'tell' was in the wording of his warning of WWIII: of “preventing them from hav[ing] the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." No program or specific threat needed apparently. Stuck without The Daily Show's writers, we still have Juan Cole, who has more background on this and the spin involving counterintuitive leaks to journalist Seymour Hersh. Crooks and Liars notes more aspects of the spin in this video comment and in the video links above.

Update: For perspective here's an earlier blurb from a senior adviser to Bush (probably Karl Rove) in the New York Times Magazine, ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Update 2: Countdown with Keith Olbermann discussed the entire background on 12-7-2007 in Deceiving America. The special comment segment (QT movie) looked at how the language itself evolved this year. It's funny how it takes a sports guy to get things done in broadcast news, especially on a story so important that career officials (with Guy Fawkes masks?) were willing to go to prison if the adminstration did not interrupted their regularly scheduled program and release the nearly year-old NIE report.