White House Says Top Aide Was Not Behind C.I.A. Leak

( NY Times ) - The White House said today that it was “ridiculous” for anyone to suggest that President Bush’s top political adviser had leaked secret information in an effort to discredit an outspoken critic of Mr. Bush’s policy on Iraq.

Just maybe they would have a little more credibility if the same sort of comment hadn’t been made in answer to almost every alligation against Bush or his administration since this whole mess began.

Rice has her problems with the House Intelligence Committee questioning the credibility of U.S. intelligence used to justify the war on Iraq but maintains:

… that the Bush administration had fresh and plausible information that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before the war began. “There was enrichment of intelligence from 1998 over the period leading up to the war,”

If the information was so fresh, so enriched, and so credible why then has the actual hard physical evidence been so hard to provide now that they’re there? For those paying attention note the spin (via USA Today) in this paragraph.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Fox News Sunday that “it was very clear” before the war that Saddam Hussein’s efforts to acquire chemical and biological weapons “continued, and it was a gathering danger.”

In one sentence we have gone from the early ‘he is an imminent threat to the freeworld and the people of the United States of America’ to ‘he was trying to acquire….’ which is not the same thing at all - now is it?

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