AND NOW, FROM THE CAN, WE PRESENT WORM #2

George Tenet's non-apology apology is not likely to end anything. Tenet's explanation still leaves unanswered questions, such as: just who decided to put that ever so carefully worded sentence into the SOTU in the first place? and so on, and so forth

But questions about intelligence are not limited to fictitious African uranium sales. There's also the whole Al Qaeda link thing.

Before the war, Bush and members of his cabinet said Saddam was harboring top al-Qaida operatives and suggested Iraq could slip the terrorist network chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons.

Critics attacked those assertions from the beginning for being counter to the ideologies of Saddam and al-Qaida and short on corroborating evidence. Now, two former Bush administration intelligence officials say the evidence linking Saddam to the group responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was never more than sketchy at best.

''There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist operation,'' former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann said this week.

Intelligence agencies agreed on the ''lack of a meaningful connection to al-Qaida'' and said so to the White House and Congress, said Thielmann, who left State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research last September.

Another former Bush administration intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed there was no clear link between Saddam and al-Qaida.

''The relationships that were plotted were episodic, not continuous,'' the former official said.

I suppose this is also the CIA's fault? Should Dubya turn to Poppy for answers? Between this, the Niger uranium, the aluminum tubing, and the lack of any discoveries at all, nothing is going away.

Anyway, I'm in the middle of a relaxing weekend, hope yours is as well.