The North Korea intel botch is worse than you think. [View All]

[atommom]

It's too bad that the U.S. political system offers no way to take a vote of "no confidence," because that describes the state we're living in now. We have come to the point where nothing that the Bush administration says can—or should—be trusted. That is, the government deserves no confidence.

This judgment (which many might view as laughably late) is sparked by stories in Thursday's New York Times and Washington Post quoting senior U.S. intelligence officials saying that North Korea might not have an enriched-uranium program after all.

The revelation is stunning on two levels.
First, it suggests that the Bush administration could have struck a deal to halt the North Koreans' nuclear-weapons program five years ago—before they reprocessed 8,000 nuclear fuel rods into plutonium, before they tested a nuclear bomb for the first time, before they officially became a "nuclear-weapons state."

Second (and this is the reason for the "no-confidence" stamp), it shows that Bush and his people will say anything, no matter whether it's true, in order to shore up a political point. It means that U.S. intelligence has become completely corrupted.

more: http://www.slate.com/id/2160958/fr/rss/