Bush lies about Iran's nuclear program, Cheney tried to block intelligence

"So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously."
-- GW Bush, 10/17/07

A declassified summary of the latest National Intelligence Estimate found with "high confidence" that the Islamic republic stopped an effort to develop nuclear weapons in the fall of 2003.

The problem, this report was completed in 2006 and Bush and Cheney continued to lie about Iran being an imminent nuclear threat.

Think Progress has documented six instances of Bush, Cheney, and administration officials touting the Iran nuclear threat with in the past 60 days - when they knew of this intelligence report.

How do we know they knew about it? Cheney didn't like what it said and delayed the release of the NIE. The report has exposed Bush and Cheney as deliberate liars. Nothing new.

UPDATE: TP notes -

Yesterday, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters that President Bush was first briefed on the National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusions on Wednesday, Nov. 28.

But today in an interview with CNN, Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker’s Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist, revealed that Bush actually knew about the NIE at least two days earlier and had a “private discussion” about it with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert before the Middle East peace summit in Annapolis, MD, last week.

and...

White House knew of NIE’s judgments for months.

Harper’s Scott Horton interviewed an intelligence community official who casts doubt on the White House’s claim that they only recent learned of the NIE’s judgments:

But one highly reliable intelligence community source I consulted immediately after Hadley spoke answered my question this way: “This is absolutely absurd. The NIE has been in substantially the form in which it was finally submitted for more than six months. The White House, and particularly Vice President Cheney, used every trick in the book to stop it from being finalized and issued. There was no last minute breakthrough that caused the issuance of the assessment.” So what, I asked, if not an intelligence breakthrough, what caused the last-minute change and the sudden issuance of the summary of the NIE? My source had no idea.

Horton’s source adds that though it appears Vice President Cheney “and his team” had “to fold their cards” on “plans for an air war in Iran,” Cheney’s “a tenacious son-of-a-bitch. He may very well be back at it tomorrow.”

More proof of the lie.