Four Paragraphs

The Knight Ridder coverage of Bush's speech begins with basic he-said she-said coverage we've come to know and hate but if you read down far enough you get:

Before the war, the President and his aides contended Hussein was concealing nuclear, biological and chemical warfare programs in violation of a U.N. ban. None have ever been found.

Hussein, they said, was in league with al-Qaeda and had to be toppled before he could give banned weapons to terrorists.

The administration relied in part on a seriously flawed, hastily written October 2002 U.S. intelligence assessment, which concluded that Hussein was hiding an illegal nuclear-weapons program and stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons.

But the administration's assertions about Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda were not supported by U.S. intelligence agencies.