“The president is pleased that the director of central intelligence acknowledged what needed to be acknowledged. The president has moved on…”

July 13, 2003

Oh good for him.

But wait. The Pres­i­dent also defends CIA direc­tor Tenet who gave him bad infor­ma­tion. So Tenet cov­ered Bush’s bot­tom and now Bush is cov­er­ing Tenet’s so now we can move on. How convenient.

In a TV stu­dio a few blocks away Don­ald Rums­feld has the balls to con­tin­ue defend­ing the inclu­sion of the obvi­ous forgery in the State of the Union address. On a polit­i­cal talk show, he said the Niger ura­ni­um claim was “tech­ni­cal­ly cor­rect” since the Pres­i­dent just said British Intel­li­gence thought it was true. Of course, the Brits have said they said it because Amer­i­can intel­li­gence had told them it was true. Again, how con­ve­nient. I almost expect some­one to say the inclu­sion of the forgery was okay because the Pres­i­dent had his fin­gers crossed behind his back as he read that part of the speech.

I think we could go too far in the who-said-what depart­ment with this speech. It was one speech, grant­ed the most impor­tant of the year, but still the big issue is that Bush repeat­ed­ly fed the Amer­i­can peo­ple dubi­ous claims about Iraq’s pro­grams to build weapons of mass destruc­tion. When­ev­er a reporter asked a hard ques­tion about these claims, the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion essen­tial­ly told us there was more intel­li­gence that they could­n’t share and that we should all trust them. Well it’s turned out the Admin­is­tra­tion was wrong. This is a colos­sal fail­ure and this is the big scan­dal of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion and the biggest source of shame for the Amer­i­can and British peoples.