originally posted by 9215 in LBN -
Yellowcake-gate
What price will President Bush have to pay for his 16-word scam?
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By Arianna Huffington
July 16, 2003 | Poor Karl Rove. He spends close to two years meticulously staging photo ops and carefully crafting sound bites to create the image of President Bush as a take-charge, man-the-controls, land the jet on the deck of the aircraft carrier, "Bring 'em on" kind of leader. But now the latest revelations about the Misstatement of the Union fiasco are threatening to bring back the old notion of W. as a bumbling, detached figurehead in chief.
And it's the president's own people who are painting this unflattering portrait.
Take George Tenet: While robotically impaling himself on his sword, the CIA director took great pains to point out that he thought so little of the Niger/Saddam uranium connection that he and his deputies refused to bring it up in congressional briefings as far back as fall 2002. It just didn't meet his standards.
Same with Colin Powell. The secretary went on at great length about the intense vetting process -- "four days and three nights" locked up with the leaders of the CIA, working "until midnight, 1 o'clock every morning," going over "every single thing we knew about all of the various issues with respect to weapons of mass destruction" -- that went into deciding what information would be used in his United Nations presentation. A presentation that ultimately did not include the Niger allegation because it was not, in Powell's words, "standing the test of time."
more
http://salon.com/opinion/huffington/2003/07/16/state_of_the_union/index.html