BUSH ADMITTED "Niger yellowcake" should NOT have been used in his SOTUA.

[LynnTheDem]

Funny how the MSM and rightwingnuttery have totally forgotten that wee fact.

[jsamuel]

1. Link?

[LynnTheDem]

7. here ya go...

Bush Recantation Of Iraq Claim
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29766-2003Jul8?language=printer

White House Admits WMD Error
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/07/09/iraq/main562312.shtml

White House admits to error
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/2003/07/09/stories/2003070901181500.htm

[TomClash]

11. It's also in Coopers' article nt

[Oversea Visitor]

2. Never admit

just attack.... aaah caught with pants down.... Damn ATTACK

[madeline_con]

3. Then, why say it...

was his pen out of ink, making it impossible to scratch that section out?

[Carolab]

4. Actually, Tenet took the fall for him, remember?

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/11/sprj.irq.wmdspeech/

And look how CONDI lied, here (actually, there are lots of lies asserted here, and also read what Durbin said...)

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, while expressing support for Tenet, said Friday that the CIA had cleared the speech "in its entirety."

"The president did not knowingly say anything that we knew to be false," she said, en route to Uganda, one stop on Bush's Africa trip.

'Beginning to sound a little like Watergate'
The flap over the speech dogged Bush as he traveled through Africa this week on a five-nation tour. But speaking to reporters Friday in Uganda, the president defended the larger content and purpose of the address.

"It was a speech that detailed to the American people the dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime," he said. "My government took the appropriate response to those dangers. And as a result, the world is going to be more secure and more peaceful." (Full story)

However, Democrats, including some of those running against Bush in 2004, offered withering criticism over the error.

"It's beginning to sound a little like Watergate," said former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. "It's very clear that it may be George Tenet's responsibility, but that information also existed in the State Department and it also existed in the vice president's office, so they will not get away with simply throwing George Tenet over the side."

[President Jesus]

5. ummm...didn't the White House say this two years ago?

[Carolab]

6. Yes...AFTER Wilson's op-ed appeared in the Times!

So, what's your point?

And anyway, HOW did this information get into the address in the first place, when it was initially REMOVED?

Who made THAT decision?

John McCain said that whoever did it should be fired!

Then Tenet took the fall--he said he should have prevented it--but WHO GOT IT IN THERE to begin with?

[LynnTheDem]

8. My point is, the rightwingnutter are calling Wilson a LIAR. Yet BUSH

admitted the "error" of using the bullshit "Niger yellowcake" in his Jan 2003 speech AFTER Tenet had told him take it OUT of his 2002 speech.

In other words, in BUSH'S own admittance, Wilson was right. That's my point. That & the fact that the "MSM" seems to have forgotten that fact.

[Carolab]

9. I don't recall Bush admitting it at all. Tenet took the fall for it.

That's MY point. The articles state "the White House" admits it was a mistake, as told by Ari Fleischer, and later taken responsibility for by Tenet.

Ever read Karen Kwiatkowski's paper? She explains how it was bullshit because it was never part of the OSP's "talking points". She also explains how "the truth" was relegated to "footnotes".

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0310-09.htm

{snip}

The other change made to the talking points was along the line of fine-tuning and generalizing. Much of what was there was already so general as to be less than accurate.

Some bullets were softened, particularly statements of Saddam's readiness and capability in the chemical, biological or nuclear arena. Others were altered over time to match more exactly something Bush and Cheney said in recent speeches. One item I never saw in our talking points was a reference to Saddam's purported attempt to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. The OSP list of crime and evil had included Saddam's attempts to seek fissionable materials or uranium in Africa. This point was written mostly in the present tense and conveniently left off the dates of the last known attempt, sometime in the late 1980s. I was surprised to hear the president's mention of the yellowcake in Niger in his 2002 State of the Union address because that indeed was new and in theory might have represented new intelligence, something that seemed remarkably absent in any of the products provided us by the OSP (although not for lack of trying). After hearing of it, I checked with my old office of Sub-Saharan African Affairs -- and it was news to them, too. It also turned out to be false.

It is interesting today that the "defense" for those who lied or prevaricated about Iraq is to point the finger at the intelligence. But the National Intelligence Estimate, published in September 2002, as remarked upon recently by former CIA Middle East chief Ray McGovern, was an afterthought. It was provoked only after Sens. Bob Graham and Dick Durban noted in August 2002, as Congress was being asked to support a resolution for preemptive war, that no NIE elaborating real threats to the United States had been provided. In fact, it had not been written, but a suitable NIE was dutifully prepared and submitted the very next month. Naturally, this document largely supported most of the outrageous statements already made publicly by Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld about the threat Iraq posed to the United States. All the caveats, reservations and dissents made by intelligence were relegated to footnotes and kept from the public. Funny how that worked.

{snip}

[Carolab]

10. Lynn, see this--Condi's interview with Gwen Ifil--and her lame excuses.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2086461/

{snip}

"Readers of Chatterbox's earlier Yellowcakegate column, "Cheney Wraps His Glutes in the Flag," will immediately spot an inconsistency in Rice's account. The same inconsistency surfaced in the otherwise-believable mea culpa offered by Rice's assistant, Steve Hadley. Both Rice and Hadley state that they had already removed the offending line from the Cincinnati speech when Tenet sent them a memo urging them to remove it. Tenet had already told Hadley by phone to take it out, and Hadley had complied. If, as Rice says, it's axiomatic that when the CIA director wants something out of a presidential speech, it comes out, Tenet would have known there was no danger that his complaint—the way Rice makes it sound, it was more like a command—would go unheeded. So why did Tenet—a man who is so busy fighting the war on terrorism that three months later he didn't have time to read an advance draft of the State of the Union, an oversight that made him Yellowcakegate's Fall Guy No. 1—write a superfluous memo?

Because, Chatterbox believes, it wasn't superfluous. Tenet knew that his complaint was not a command and that somebody at the White House still needed convincing. But who would have the standing to tell the CIA director to go jump in the lake? Surely not Fall Guy No. 2, the National Security Council's nonproliferation expert, Robert Joseph. Surely not Fall Guy No. 3, the NSC's deputy, Steve Hadley. And surely not even Fall Person No. 4, Condi Rice, who'd have to be insane to lie, on national television, about dissing Tenet. (Tenet, she surely knows, is superb at exacting revenge.)

Chatterbox therefore posits the existence of a Fall Guy No. 5, Vice President Dick Cheney. The one person in the White House who has no patience for addressing the Yellowcakegate mystery at all and who questions the patriotism of anybody who does. Who pushed the Saddam-is-about-to-get-nukes line harder than anyone else in the Bush White House. Who has an eerie gift for making the most outrageous actions sound reasonable. (In The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann likened him to an IV delivering serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.) Who, Chatterbox believes, would have been angered to learn that the yellowcake reference came out of the Cincinnati speech, and who thereafter would have made damn sure it didn't get censored again."

[TomClash]

12. So . . .

what about the rest of the WMD?

Or fixing the Iraqi elections?

The great national security threat and the elixir of "democracy" and "freedom."

Another bright shining lie.