Our Washington sources, tie Obama's remarks to a revealing comment by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's chief of staff Esfandyar Rahim Mashai on July 31, to which the US president felt bound to respond. What Mashai said was this:
"The West raised no objections to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's candid avowal that the Islamic Republic could build a nuclear bomb."
What avowal?
On February 7, said Mashai, Ahmadinejad made a speech at the National Center for Laser Science and Technology. This talk went unnoticed by US intelligence agencies, he claimed.
"One of the points Dr. Ahmadinejad made during his visit to this center was the possibility of enriching (uranium) to 100 percent, which means building an atom bomb."
"Interestingly, not a single foreign publication made a hullabaloo or raised an uproar (over this dramatic revelation)," Mashai noted. "This shows," he concluded, "that they (the US) are not worried about an atom bomb, because essentially, Dr. Ahmadinejad said this to test them (the US) in order to see what degree of worry they have about Iran producing an atom bomb."
Five days later, President Obama made his worry known to Tehran by means of his otherwise unexplained press briefing.
In the meantime, US intelligence analysts and Iran strategists had been busy trying to figure out why the admission of an Iranian nuclear bomb capability had been allowed to slip off Ahmadinejad's well-oiled tongue and why he had let his chief of staff Iran go to the trouble of bringing the hitherto strenuously-denied goal of Iran's nuclear program out in the open.