Please, please, please--for you folks who normally vote for presidential candidates outside of the democratic and republican parties, consider voting democrat next time for the sole purpose of getting Bush out of office.

George Tenet's mia culpa does nothing to explain GWB's intent to mislead the nation. GWB wanted to tie Iraq to a nuclear device in his speech and pulled out all stops to put it there. The only reason it's an issue now, is they got caught.

In October 2002, the Intelligence Community (IC) produced a classified, 90 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's WMD programs in which the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research included a sentence that states: "Finally, the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR's assessment, highly dubious." (From Tenet's statement)

So at the time of the SOTUS, the NSC knew the US State Department believed Iraq's pursuit of "yellowcake" in Africa was bogus.

Portions of the State of the Union speech draft came to the CIA for comment and review. Although the documents related to the alleged Niger-Iraqi uranium deal had not yet been determined to be forgeries, officials who were reviewing the draft remarks on uranium raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with National Security Council colleagues (Condi Rice and the VP are members). Some of the language was changed. From what we know now, Agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct. (from Tenet's statement)

Sure, the statement was technically correct, however the intent was to deceive the American public and the world into believing Iraq was closer than expected to a complete a nuclear device and was therefore an imminent threat to the USA. Condi knew the statement could not be attributed American intelligence because the C.I.A. had already debunked it.

This obvious deception served GWB's purpose to gather support for launching a pre-emptive strike.

No one is denying the White House and NSC parsed the words in the SOTUS with the CIA to arrive at the technically correct 16 words referring to Iraq nuclear ambitions.

GWB and the NSC knew exactly how the CIA and State Department felt about the validity of the Iraq/Africa nuclear connection intelligence, yet it deliberately left the bogus statement in the single most important speech made by an American president for the sole purpose of misleading the Congress, the American public and the world.

When is the president actually responsible for what he says? I believe the buck starts here.