URANIUM UPDATE….Here’s the morning roundup on uranium, along with a few comments:
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The Washington Post reports that the Bush administration released eight pages of the October National Intelligence Estimate on Friday, “including various findings supporting Bush’s charges against Iraq.” It’s funny how top secret documents can be rather quickly and easily declassified when they contain information that supports the administration, isn’t it? How about releasing the other 82 pages?
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According to the Post, neither Bush nor Condoleezza Rice read the entire report. I’m fine with Bush not reading it all, but Rice? Isn’t that her job?
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Yesterday’s briefing was conducted by a “senior administration official” who insisted on remaining anonymous. That’s really annoying. Basically, there are now a few hundred people in Washington who know who it was, but they all have to pretend otherwise and they can’t tell the rest of us. Sheesh.
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Josh Marshall has a transcript of the briefing session and says that the big news is that the White House is now denying that anyone in the administration ever changed the language of the State of the Union address based on CIA doubts. As Josh points out, “That directly contradicts what Alan Foley is reported to have said in Wednesday’s closed-door hearing in the Senate.”
However, as Josh also points out, and as you can see for yourself if you take a look at the transcript, the White House’s case is now so completely impenetrable that it’s hard to know for sure exactly what they’re claiming.
By the way, in case you haven’t figured this out yet, your best sources for Uranium-Gate information are the Washington Post and Josh Marshall. Between the two of them, you won’t miss much.
And for your weekend amusement, below is a screen shot from the White House website showing President Bush hard at work reviewing the State of the Union speech line by line, word by word. Click for more!
UPDATE: How embarrassing ? I didn’t notice that I was originally using a picture from the 2002 State of the Union address. Everything is now fixed and fully up to date. Thanks, Howard.
