Completely Corrupted

Fred Kaplan is right. In 2002, the administration said they were sure North Korea was enrichening uranium. That was when they were trying to justify abandoning the Agreed Framework. Today, they are trying to bolster the case for a deal that is similar to the Agreed Framework, so they've changed their story: now they say they weren't really sure whether North Korea was enrichening uranium.

Here's Kaplan:

[This] 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.

It would be nice to know whether Iran is supplying Iraqi insurgents with particularly deadly explosives. It would be nice to know how far along the Iranians are coming with their (quite real) enriched-uranium program. It would be nice to know lots of things about this dangerous world. Or it would, at least, be nice to have a true sense of how much our intelligence agencies know about such things.

But we don't know how much these agencies know, because we can have no confidence in what the Bush administration tells us they know.

690 days to go. Cross your fingers and hold your breath.