Some are suggesting the latest disclosure about Iran’s nuclear program is no big deal, given that it is not really news to insiders; or that it was disclosed at precisely the right time to illustrate Obama’s careful diplomacy in getting the U.K. and France on board. But to me it is a much bigger deal that Obama knew of this facility even during the transition last autumn, as his radical new policy toward Iran was being formulated.

Officially, the American people have had to assume the truthfulness of the most recent, highly questionable national intelligence estimate of 2007 (“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program”). Why, then, was not the updated information released earlier, and the 2007 estimate rendered inoperative, especially since that flawed assessment has been used to demagogue the issue? I recall candidate Joe Biden in 2007 asserting, “Let’s get this straight. In 2003, they stopped their program.” And it was the supposed authority of the 2007 estimate that prompted candidate Obama to claim that the Senate decree naming the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization was wrong and gave Bush “a blank check” to go to war with Iran.

Other questions. If there are suddenly two facilities, why not three, four, or more? Do we know about others that are better left undisclosed? And did we keep quiet about this supposed intelligence coup to allow bold, new diplomatic efforts to proceed — efforts that might not have gone on had the American people learned that the Iranians were escalating, that the IAEA was incompetent or duplicitous, and that the much-publicized diplomatic initiatives Obama set to wow us with in October might be sidetracked if the information were disclosed?

That Iran probably knew all this time that we knew about its additional centrifuges, and that we were deliberately sitting on that information all through our publicized efforts at new outreach (and through our silence during the popular uprisings in Tehran), can’t be reassuring. Moreover, the disclosure of further enriched Iranian uranium takes on added interest as more news is released of various terrorist plots in the U.S., some of them perhaps envisioning the use of WMD.

I hope the prior outrage over faulty intelligence and WMD and Iraq will extend to the latest incompetence — that intelligence agencies that swore in 2007 that Iran stopped working on the bomb in 2003 now, in 2009, have assured the president that their intelligence has disclosed a new Iranian facility that is not used for peaceful purposes.