"FICTITIOUS REASONS"

Now let's all go grovelling back to Michael Moore, please.

The White House has acknowledged for the first time that President George W. Bush should not have claimed in his State of the Union address that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, The Washington Post reported.

The newspaper said the statement was prompted by publication of a British parliamentary commission report that raised serious questions about the reliability of British intelligence that was cited by Bush as part of his effort to convince Congress that the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program was a threat to US security.

Asked about the British report, the administration released a statement that effectively conceded that intelligence underlying the president's statement was wrong, The Post said

"Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech," the paper quoted a senior Bush administration official as saying.

Bush said in his State of the Union speech on January 28 that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." (full story)

It's this simple: they LIED. Of course, if you've been following the Niger issue closely over the past months, this should have come as no surprise (the lie, though not the admission of the lie)

Walter Pincus of the WaPo, in his recap, hits the important point that renders any Bush explanation outside of either 1) deception or 2) severe incompetence to be utter bullplop (link via kos):

It subsequently emerged that the CIA the previous year had dispatched a respected former senior diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson, to Niger to investigate the allegation and that Wilson had reported back that officials in Niger denied the story. The administration never made Wilson's mission public, and questions have been raised over the past month over how the CIA characterized his conclusion in its classified intelligence reports inside the administration. (italics mine)

Secrecy? From this administration? Nah!

On that note, Cheney may have to turn over those energy files after all. Or maybe not, we'll see...