From WSJ:
July 12, 2003
12:45am EDT
URL:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/25/eveningnews/main560449.shtml
BY JAMES TARANTO
Friday, July 11, 2003 2:09 p.m. EDT
Psychic Dems Network
"Bush Knew Iraq Info Was Dubious" reads the CBSNews.com headline. Last night, as a Google search shows, the same story was titled "Bush Knew Iraq Info Was False." It turns out that the story says nothing of the sort. The reference is to Bush's statement, toward the end of his 2003 State of the Union address, that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
So now there's this big brouhaha about just how this 16-word sentence got into a 5,500-word speech. Did the CIA know? That's a silly question. The CIA is a big organization; not everyone in it knows the same things. The Associated Press reports National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice says that "if CIA Director George Tenet had any misgivings about that sentence in the president's speech, 'he did not make them known' to Bush or his staff." But CBS reports that "CIA officials warned members of the President's National Security Council staff the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa." Of course, Bush didn't "make the flat statement"; he merely cited a British report, which turned out to be false. CBS acknowledges that "the statement was technically correct."
Democrats, showing again their complete lack of perspective, are trying to turn this to their political advantage. "Campaigning in New Hampshire, Democrat Howard Dean demanded the resignation of any Bush administration official or federal government employee who failed to tell the president that claims about Iraq buying uranium from Africa were false," reports the Associated Press. Of course, the story seems to be that no one told Bush, which means that Dean is demanding the resignation of the entire federal government--which may end up vindicating another State of the Union claim that we'd thought was phony, namely "The era of big government is over."
John Kerry also got into the act. The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam, "said he is not prepared to draw a conclusion on whether the administration deliberately misled the country about the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but said his 'level of concern is very high,' " reports the Washington Post.
The subtext of all this is the claim some Dems have been making for some time now, namely that Bush "misled" the country into war. But it is logically impossible for the SOTU snafu to support this claim. Bush delivered the speech on Jan. 28, 2003--109 days after Congress voted to go to war. Are Kerry and the others who voted "aye" going to claim that they somehow knew what the president was going to say more than three months in advance? What are they, psychic? |
