HELP! Link? WH & CIA "compromised" how to word the uranium claim in SOTU?

[Brotherjohn]

I've asked within other posts here if anyone can remember this story, but never gotten a bite. I recall it may have been a Washington Post story. Josh Marshall refers specifically to it today (I was starting to think I imagined it).

"As we learned later that summer and fall, those carefully chosen words had a very precise rationale behind them. The White House tried and failed to get the uranium claim into the October 7th, 2002 Cincinnati speech. The same battle was refought in late January of 2003 as the same parties struggled back and forth over whether the claim would be inserted in the State of the Union address. The CIA refused to countenance the use of the claim. So a compromise of sorts was struck. The president wouldn't be a fact witness to the allegation. He'd hang it on the Brits."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

It seems to me, this very act (and whomever was involved in it in the White House) is the most concrete, easily proven, example that were were lied to in order to gain support for this war. The White House KNEW this information was dubious at best, yet changed the language to be "technically" accurate.

This very act proves that they were INTENTIONALLY DECEPTIVE.

i.e. they LIED.

[displacedtexan]

1. Has anyone ever ascertained...

exactly where the British govt claimed their Niger uranium info came from?

I have a feeling that BushCo was the source of those "compromise" words: "The British government has learned..."

[Brotherjohn]

2. Josh Marshall links to his earlier posts on this in the link above.

I've read this from him in the past. I recall it gets a little convoluted, but its pretty clear that the Brits are mostly just echoing the initial "report" by SISMI (Italian Intelligence) and really have nothing further to back up what they had "learned".

BTW, if they (or Bush Co.) HAD learned anything else, they were legally obligated to share it with the IAEA. To date, they haven't. They DID of course, finally, provide the IAEA with the Niger documents... about a week before the war. It took the IAEA about a day to conclusively prove they were forgeries. My guess is, it took the CIA about as long. But the WH wasn't having any of it.