July 8, 2003 - Well it wasn’t until after Air Force One left the tarmac for the President’s Grand African Tour that his press office made its announcement. The timing was impeccable. It wouldn’t do for the press to be shouting questions at the Chief Executive that might embarrass him on the threshold of such an important foreign policy initiative to make West Africa safe for Halliburton, now would it? So Ari waited until the plane left the ground to announce that the President’s claim in the State of The Union that Iraq was buying African uranium may not have been exactly true and that the Whitehouse no longer stood behind the statement. Ari did not have quite the chutzpah possessed by his late predecessor, Ron Ziegler. Ron simply told us that falsehoods uttered by the Nixon administration were “inoperative statements”. Ziegler did not know at the time he coined that phrase that it would turn out to be the cancer growing on the Presidency that would prove to be inoperable.

But, Ari assures us, the President did not lie. He simply made honest statements based on “flawed intelligence”. Now there is a phrase for you, “flawed intelligence”. It must be that same “flawed intelligence” that produced the Rice-Rumsfeld-Powell tour of the talk shows warning us of an impending mushroom cloud. It must be the same “flawed intelligence” that coupled the African uranium forgeries with the aluminum tube deception to create the reconstituted nuclear weapons program. That must be the “flawed intelligence” that Ari is talking about.

It seems that the whole of the Bush Administration has been making decisions while it relied on flawed intelligence – the flawed public intelligence that leads the people to want to believe what their President tells them in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. It is the flawed intelligence that helps the true believer rationalize away the “inoperative statements” and still believe the content. The “flawed intelligence” that tells that segment of the people that you can fool all of the time that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction; that tax cut for the wealthy create jobs for the poor; and that the Iraq is “Mission Accomplished”.

The excuse for repeating the “flawed intelligence” is that “nobody told the Whitehouse”. Apparently nobody told the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense or the National Security Advisor either. We do know that somebody told Dick Cheney’s office and that somebody was Ambassador Wilson. We know he reported the forgeries as a result of the mission the Vice-President sent him on in February 2002. Perhaps the Vice-President had simply forgotten when he echoed the story in January and February 2003.

Yes, the problem is “flawed intelligence”; ours, for not testing the evidence before blindly falling in line; and theirs, for thinking no one would ever catch on.