Will the real George Tenet please stand up?
A blog called Eschaton has been all over the Bush/CIA story about Bush's lie, I highly suggest giving that whole site a good read. Matt is also correct, now that Bush has blamed the CIA for his lie and the media has gone to the CIA seeking answers, do you really think that the head of the CIA, George Tenet, is going to say that Bush is wrong? Not unless he has a death wish. This isn't Britain, where the intelligence agencies tended to back away from Blair, some officials coming out saying that they felt pressured to lie about Iraq.

Here's the fact of the matter: in March 2002, on orders from the office of the Vice President Dick Cheney, the CIA sent Joseph Wilson to Niger to find out whether or not Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from that country. Mr. Wilson found out that this claim was false, returned to America and filed a report with the CIA. He was debriefed by the CIA and the State Department. He has also been told by officials at the CIA that his report reached the highest levels of American and British government. At least on this side of the pond, this makes sense. It was the veep's office that sent Mr. Wilson to Niger in the first place. I simply doesn't make sense that the CIA would neglect handing over Mr. Wilson's report to the veep's office after it was filed.

So, this tells us that our government investigated the Iraq/Niger uranium sales and found these claims to be false 10 months before Bush's state of the union address, and these claims were reported to Dick Cheney by the CIA. So, we come back to the question that is the point of the scandal: why did Bush claim that Iraq tried to purchase uranium "from Africa"?

The one thing we know for sure now is that somebody at the CIA is lying. I'm pointing my finger at George Tenet, because it simply doesn't make sense that Dick Cheney wouldn't be privy to intelligence that his office commissioned the CIA to gather. It's a fair and reasonable assumption to say that Dick Cheney knew, 10 months in advance of Bush's SOTU speech, that Niger did not sell uranium to Iraq. To assume that Cheney did not share this information with Bush in that time period is stretching reality, as far as I am concerned. We know that Bush knew. We know that Bush lied. Why should we believe Bush now that he's blaming the CIA?

Eschaton dropped a bomb on George Tenet's side of the story yesterday, proving the man to be a liar. Before Bush's speech in Cincinnati on 10/7/02, Tenet himself told Condi Rice's top advisor Steven Hadley not to reference the Africa/uranium report from Bush's speech. We can add this to the mounting pile of evidence that top officials within the CIA and Bush administration knew that Iraq had not tried to purchase uranium from Africa. We know for sure that Tenet, Cheney, and Rice knew before Bush's 2003 SOTU address. It's unfathomable to say that Bush didn't know.

Tenet's done a shitty job covering up for Bush, and the Bush administration has done an equally poor job in trying to sweep this story under the carpet. I'm hoping that the mainstream American media finally grows some balls and asks the real George Tenet to stand up. The story shouldn't stop there, though. A story such as this questions the very motiives of the Bush administration for going to war in Iraq. If they lied about weapons of mass destruction, then what's the real [cough]oil[cough] reason?