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Turn on Fan. Cue Shit.

...The White House was looking for damning evidence against Saddam. In fact, Isikoff said that Cheney's office made contact with Ambassador Joseph Wilson before the CIA sent him on a special mission to Africa to investigate in early 2002.

You would think, then, that Cheney's office would have requested a copy of Wilson's report once he got back -- the report in which he concluded that Saddam in fact had never made any attempt to buy uranium from Niger.

As of this morning, the White House line was that not only did Cheney's office never request that report, they never saw it, and neither did anyone else in the administration!

Wilson says copies were distributed to the Pentagon, the CIA, the White House and the State Department.

As of this morning, the White House line was that the administration never saw Wilson's report, and instead relied on British intelligence for Bush's State of the Union address, and that it was the Brits who erroneously reported the uranium-buying.

But hold on. That won't work either.

This afternoon, British intelligence officials reported that they debunked the uranium-buying story months in advance the State of the Union.

So now what? Well now we turn to the Italians.

The new official White House li(n)e -- as of this evening -- is that we relied on Italian intelligence for the uranium-buying story that President Bush used in his State of the Union speech that scared up public support for the war. And that, for whatever reason, White House officials were privy to classifed Italian intelligence on Saddam's uranium habit, but not to British intelligence -- or to our own fucking CIA's.

Pardon my language. But as Colin Powell reportedly said while looking over the evidence of Saddam's WMD program:

"This is bullshit."...

...If the Bush administration knew just seven days after the State of the Union that the uranium charge was false, why did they wait until yesterday to admit it publicly? Why did we go to war with most of the American public still under the impression that Saddam was actively seeking enriched uranium?...