It looks like the Bush Administration is doing the same kind of language parsing that Clinton got impeached for :

President Bush said Friday that intelligence services cleared his State of the Union speech, which included a now-discredited allegation that Iraq was seeking to buy nuclear material from Africa.

Bush’s national security adviser specifically said the CIA had vetted the speech. If CIA Director George Tenet had any misgivings about that sentence in the president’s speech, “he did not make them known” to Bush or his staff, said Condoleezza Rice.

Notice it doesn’t say “If the CIA had any misgivings” but rather “If CIA Director George Tenet had any misgivings”. Sure, the CIA had problems with the Niger intelligence, but George Tenet didn’t personally veto anything from the speech. As the CBS report mentioned yesterday, the speech was approved with one important change :

CIA officials warned members of the President?s National Security Council staff the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa.

The White House officials responded that a paper issued by the British government contained the unequivocal assertion: ?Iraq has … sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.? As long as the statement was attributed to British Intelligence, the White House officials argued, it would be factually accurate. The CIA officials dropped their objections and that?s how it was delivered.

So this is how it’s gonna go down. Bush blames the CIA and the CIA blames the Brits. Either way, Bush intentionally misled a join session of Congress. Also, let’s not forget that this wasn’t the only shoddy information that Bush used. Aluminum tubes anyone??