Monday, July 14, 2003


One Question...

The one question I didn't see asked of Rumsfeld or Rice on any of the Sunday talk shows this morning:

The president gave the State of the Union address in January. By February, when Colin Powell went to the United Nations to make the case for war, the administration apparently was confident enough that the Niger-uranium connection was bogus to have pulled that piece of evidence from the presentation.

(Actually, Rice admitted this morning that as early as October of 2002, advisors had pulled the Niger story out of an address the president was to give in Cincinnati, due to its suspect authenticity. But for the sake of argument, we'll go with February.)

That means that from February to July, the Bush administration knew that the president had given false information to the American people in his State of the Union address.

Here's my question:

If this was all an innocuous, innocent, aw-shucks mistake, why did they wait until they were caught to admit it should never have been in the speech?...