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Why did President Bush cite forged evidence about Iraq's nuclear capabilitiees in his State Of The Union address?
And he's been trying to get a direct answer to it since March, 17, 03. He tried again on June 2, 03.
A man with a long attention span, he tries again in this letter to Dr. Rice, who is, after all, Assistant to the President For National Security Affairs.
The impetus for the letter was Dr. Rice's weekend appearances on This Week with George, and Meet The Press with Tim. Tant pis, but damn if her remarks did nothing to clarify the issue for Rep. Waxman. In fact, Rep. Waxman noticed a few contradictions between what Condi said and the "known facts," and damn if that didn't just raise new questions.
Take a moment and see how Waxman lays it all out, with footnotes, yet. (PDF file, so you need Adobe Reader)
Not that I'm suggesting there isn't a perfectly credible explanation, as Walter Pincus explains in this morning's Wa Po:
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A key component of President Bush's claim in his State of the Union address last January that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program -- its alleged attempt to buy uranium in Niger -- was disputed by a CIA-directed mission to the central African nation in early 2002, according to senior administration officials and a former government official. But the CIA did not pass on the detailed results of its investigation to the White House or other government agencies, the officials said.
Boy, this administration just can't get a break in the intramural communication department, can it?
Pincus does mention Rep. Waxman. But not enough.
Any thoughts on how we can get the media to pay more attention to that letter? Or maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe the time has come for us to think of ourselves as media, in which case the question becomes, how can we focus the attention of more voters on the kind of crucial information about the ways of this administration contained in a letter like Waxman's?