Yes, it’s April Fools’ Day, but we swear we’re not making this up.

Watch president Bush make the outlandish claim that he was only briefed in the 6-month-old National Intelligence Estimate last week.

This is either the president’s baldest lie yet, or the most deeply troubling evidence ever presented of the president’s bubble of detachment and insulation.

I don’t buy the dummy act, myself. Such a cosmic level of ignorance of his administration’s own best intelligence on one of America’s top threats, however, ought to be an impeachable offense.

You know I got so agitated about fact that we’ve been lied to for the past four years about Iran’s nuclear program, that I didn’t take a moment to savor the fact that Iran hasn’t had a nuclear weapons program for the last four years.

In a sea of bad news, that some rockin’ good news. Most importantly it means we have time — and a precious window of opportunity — to bring Iran to the table and defuse this threat without brinksmanship.

Earlier: Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program? What Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program?

“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing Iran from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” — George W. Bush, a couple months back

I puzzled for a bit over that distinction between WMD knowledge and actual weapons at the time. In light of the new NIE, it’s no wonder Bush was subtly trying to lower the bar for war.

The newly declassified National Intelligence Estimate on Iran [.pdf] says it clearly:

“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.“

Wow. So what we’ve been hearing from the Bush administration for the last four years is a paranoid distortion of the facts on the ground? Shocked. We are absolutely shocked.

No wonder Dick Cheney worked so feverishly to keep this bottled up.

More key judgments:

Iran’s still not very close to a nuclear bomb:

• We judge with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough HEU [highly enriched uranium] for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely.

• We judge with moderate confidence Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame. (INR [The State Dept's intelligence agency whose dissenting judgments on Iraq were spot on] judges Iran is unlikely to achieve this capability before 2013 because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems.) All agencies recognize the possibility that this capability may not be attained until after 2015.

• We judge with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015.

The regime is rational, and sanctions may work well as a deterrent:

• Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might—if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible—prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program. It is difficult to specify what such a combination might be.

My interview with Ron Paul from the current issue — in which he denounces the “warmongering” of “chicken hawks” like Cheney and Giuliani — is now online

What do you make of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and current U.S. posturing toward Iran?

He’s a loudmouth, and he hurts their cause. But we help his cause when we gang up against him. When we pass sanctions against him, the dissidents in Iran who would like to get rid of him rally around him for nationalistic reasons.

We get hysterical over a guy who doesn’t have a single weapon, and nobody’s proven that he’s ever violated the arms-nonproliferation treaty. Matter of fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency is going to have an agreement with him by the end of the year. That’s why you have all of this warmongering going on: It is to try to find an excuse to start bombing him before they prove that he doesn’t have a chance of having a weapon. That’s exactly what we did with Iraq. I’m scared to death they’re getting ready to do that with Iran.

The Bush administration says Iran is supporting the Iraqi insurgency. How much can we trust that assessment?

About as much as what we heard about Iraq before the war. What was true about that? Very, very little, if anything. They’re capable of telling us anything if they want to go to war. And that’s what they want.

read more here…

From ABC:

Tucked inside the White House’s $196 billion emergency funding request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is an item that has some people wondering whether the administration is preparing for military action against Iran.

The item: $88 million to modify B-2 stealth bombers so they can carry a newly developed 30,000-pound bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator, or, in military-speak, the MOP.

The MOP is the the military’s largest conventional bomb, a super “bunker-buster” capable of destroying hardened targets deep underground. The one-line explanation for the request said it is in response to “an urgent operational need from theater commanders.”

What urgent need? The Pentagon referred questions on this to Central Command…

So where would the military use a stealth bomber armed with a 30,000-pound bomb like this? Defense analysts say the most likely target for this bomb would be Iran’s flagship nuclear facility in Natanz, which is both heavily fortified and deeply buried.

“You’d use it on Natanz,” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. “And you’d use it on a stealth bomber because you want it to be a surprise. And you put in an emergency funding request because you want to bomb quickly.”

I’ve been reading Cheney’s Iran speech, and it’s clearer than ever that we’re in danger of getting snookered again.

First General Petraeus laid out damning, but damnably unsourced, intel about Iranian involvement in Iraq in his presentation to congress; now Dick Cheney is citing it as gospel in building his case for war:

This same regime that approved of hostage-taking in 1979, that attacked Saudi and Kuwaiti shipping in the 1980s, that incited suicide bombings and jihadism in the 1990s and beyond, is now the world’s most active state sponsor of terror. As to its next-door neighbor, Iraq, the Iranian government claims to be a friend that supports regional stability.

In fact, it is a force for the opposite. As General Petraeus has noted, Iran’s Quds Force is trying to set up a “Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and to fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.” At the same time, Iran is “responsible for providing the weapons, the training, the funding and, in some cases, the direction for operations that have indeed killed U.S. soldiers.”

If the New Jesus said it, it must be true.