Blame it on the CIA

In Uganda, Bush and Rice blame the CIA for the false accusation of an Iraq-Niger nuclear connection. Rice said:

I can tell you, if the CIA, the director of Central Intelligence, had said, take this out of the speech, it would have been gone, without question...There was even some discussion on that specific sentence, so that it reflected better what the CIA thought. And the speech was cleared.

Rice said Bush still had confidence in George Tenet, but:

We wouldn't put anything knowingly in the speech that was false; I'm sure they wouldn't put anything knowingly in the speech that was false...In this case, this particular line shouldn't have gotten in because it was not of the quality that we would put into presidential speeches.

Update: The BBC is reporting "the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that his organisation was wrong to let President George W Bush tell the American people that Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear material from Africa."

Comments

[timothy]

i had not heard that angle on it, but i like it. better for them to say that it is a CIA problem than there own, even though they spoke about it with such zealotry just months ago.

i think they are all now saying "we are done with are war, what are you worried about," as if what led to the war was irrelevent. they sure are dirty.

*"they" can be replaced with the "the bush people" in all instances afformentioned.