Walter Pincus and Mike Allen give lots of detail in WaPo:
[A]s new facts emerge a different picture is being presented than the administration has given to date.
Details about the alleged attempt by Iraq to buy as much as 500 tons of uranium oxide were contained in a national intelligence estimate (NIE) that was concluded in late September 2002. It was that same reference that the White House wanted to use in Bush's Oct. 7 speech that Tenet blocked, the sources said. That same intelligence report was the basis for the 16-word sentence about Iraq attempting to buy uranium in Africa that was contained in the January State of the Union address that has drawn recent attention.
Administration sources said White House officials, particularly those in the office of Vice President Cheney, insisted on including Hussein's quest for a nuclear weapon as a prominent part of their public case for war in Iraq. Cheney had made the potential threat of Hussein having a nuclear weapon a central theme of his August 2002 speeches that began the public buildup toward war with Baghdad.
In the Oct. 7 Cincinnati speech, the president for the first time outlined in detail the threat Hussein posed to the United States on the eve of a congressional vote authorizing war. ... [There was] no mention of Niger or even attempts to purchase uranium from other African countries ....
By January, when conversations took place with CIA personnel over what could be in the president's State of the Union speech, White House officials again sought to use the Niger reference since it still was in the NIE.
"We followed the NIE and hoped there was more intelligence to support it," a senior administration official said yesterday. When told there was nothing new, White House officials backed off, and as a result "seeking uranium from Niger was never in drafts," he said.
Tenet raised no personal objection to the ultimate inclusion of the sentence, attributed to Britain, about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa. His statement on Friday said he should have. ...
There is still much that remains unclear about who specifically wanted the information inserted in the State of the Union speech, or why repeated concerns about the allegations were ignored.
"The information was available within the system that should have caught this kind of big mistake," a former Bush administration official said. "The question is how the management of the system, and the process that supported it, allowed this kind of misinformation to be used and embarrass the president."
A senior administration official said Bush's chief speechwriter, Michael J. Gerson, does not remember who wrote the line that has wound up causing the White House so much grief.
Right, Mr. Gerson. I'd stick to that, if I were you.
Like we we said:
Cheney, Condi, and Bush all knew The Smoking Sentence was not true. Cheney knew from Ambassador Wilson, and Condi knew from her assistant, Steven Hadley, since Tenet talked to him to get the line out of Bush's October speech.
And Bush knew, since either Cheney or Condi had to have talked to him. Heck, Tenet must have talked to him -- Bush himself says he met with Tenet "every single day". They never talked about Iraq, and Tenet never warned him about phony tales of Niger uranium? (Thanks to alert reader simplicissimus for "every single day.")
And if Tenet's job is providing plausible deniability for Bush, he's not doing a very good job -- can anyone imagine the control freaks in Unka Karls ops center not checking every word in the SOTU personally, and delegating the job to an underling like Tenet instead? LOL!
The circle closes ...
What did he know and when did he know it?