Better late than never, part one

The Washington Post for February 7 has a rundown on the distance between what US intelligence was telling the White House and what the White House was telling us those agencies said.

In its fall 2002 campaign to win congressional support for a war against Iraq, President Bush and his top advisers ignored many of the caveats and qualifiers included in the classified report on Saddam Hussein's weapons that CIA Director George J. Tenet defended Thursday.

In fact, they made some of their most unequivocal assertions about unconventional weapons before the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was completed.

Without addressing it directly, the article also again mows down the absurd White House defense of its earlier lies that it never used the word "imminent." It quotes Bushleague as calling Iraq "a grave and gathering danger" on September 12, 2002 and as "a threat of unique urgency" on the day about five weeks later when the NIE was delivered to the White House.

Meanwhile, on August 26, Dick "Head" Cheney called Iraq "as grave a threat as can be imagined." And on September 19, Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that no state "poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq."

I want someone at one of the White House press briefings to demand of Scott McClellan that he explain precisely how a threat can be "grave and gathering," "uniquely urgent," "as grave as can be imagined," and "immediate" without being "imminent."