The new intelligence was considered compelling enough to call it to Bush's attention in August. In a news conference at the White House on Tuesday, Bush said that the nation's intelligence director, J. Michael McConnell, "came in and said, 'We have some new information.' "

Bush said that McConnell did not provide details...The decision to hold those details back has come under question...But U.S. intelligence officials said they felt compelled to employ that level of caution in part because of the searing experience surrounding the war in Iraq.

"Back in 2002, one of the knocks on the process at the time was that information was not vetted by analysts and was being rushed into the Oval Office," said the senior U.S. intelligence official...This time, even as they vetted the new intelligence and launched into major revisions of the estimate on Iran's nuclear program, intelligence officials said, they deliberately shielded analysts from administration officials and policymakers.

Yet this claim they were just working away without giving the Bush administration any hint of what they were up to is directly contradicted by a Washington Post story yesterday:

Senior officials said the latest conclusions grew out of a stream of information, beginning with a set of Iranian drawings obtained in 2004 and ending with the intercepted calls between Iranian military commanders, that steadily chipped away at the earlier assessment.

In one intercept, a senior Iranian military official was specifically overheard complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered years earlier, according to a source familiar with the intelligence. The intercept was one of more than 1,000 pieces of information cited in footnotes to the 150-page classified version of the document, an official said.

Several of those involved in preparing the new assessment said that when intelligence officials began briefing senior members of the Bush administration on the intercepts, beginning in July, the policymakers expressed skepticism. Several of the president's top advisers suggested the intercepts were part of a clever Iranian deception campaign, the officials said.

So..."senior members of the Bush administration" including the "president's top advisers" were briefed "beginning in July" on the nitty-gritty of the new information, and they made specific criticisms of it. Yet the Bush administration had no idea what was going on until last week. You bet.