Andrew Sullivan:
One of the tactics of some journalists these days seems simply to invent what the administration said before the Iraq war to discredit them today. We've seen the classic argument, insinuated in the New York Times news pages, that the Bush administration claimed that the Iraqi threat from WMDs was "imminent," when the clear indication of every speech Bush gave was that we should act before the threat was imminent. Here's another one. A day after Dana Milbank and Dana Priest spun the Kay report to say precisely what it didn't, they came up with the following sentence:
[H]ours after Bush spoke, Kay provided a more mixed assessment of his finding. He said his team had turned up "no conclusive proof" that Iraq had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger, a controversial allegation made in Bush's State of the Union address.
Now what was the claim in Bush's State of the Union? The famous sixteen words are: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Not Niger - Africa, a critical distinction. And, in fact, Kay did come up with evidence of a uranium link from Africa to Saddam, with the subtle distinction that nothing was bought and the offer was unsolicited. Still, Priest's and Milbank's claim, as written, is false. Correction?
- 12:17:54 AM
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