cross-posted from dembloggers and my blog
I actually found a wonderful piece over at Worldnet Daily, believe it or not. It’s an older article, but tremendously relevant at the moment.
A photo essay on the White House website shows President Bush had a hands-on role in “revising” January’s State of the Union speech that included a now-disputed allegation about Iraq’s alleged nuclear-weapons program. It also indicates he scribbled notes beside various passages of text in the margins of the speech drafts.
Rice maintains that neither she nor the president knew the CIA raised serious doubts about the statement during the drafting of the speech.
“If there was a concern about the underlying intelligence there, the president was unaware of that concern, as was I,” she told reporters last Friday aboard Air Force One.
Just three months earlier, however, Tenet himself phoned Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley, at the White House to get him to pull a similar statement from Bush’s Iraq speech in Cincinnati.
PDBs and warnings from our head of intelligence are somehow less meaningful than tip-offs that originated with an Italian reporter. I guess that’s the case if you’re Stephen Hadley, who received the Niger story from Italy’s SIMSI. Hadley, of course, stovepiped them straight to the White House.
The newspaper reported that Pollari met at the White House on Sept. 9, 2002 with then-Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. The Niger claims surfaced shortly thereafter. A spokesman for Hadley, now the national security advisor, confirmed that the meeting took place, but declined to say what was discussed.
Hadley, who took part of the blame for the SOTU SNAFU and was promoted for it, gets my vote for “Mr. X” – the unknown source for Novak. But I digress.
…Rice’s staff worked closely with Bush’s speechwriters on the text. It’s not immediately clear how closely Bush worked with Rice or her staffers, if at all.
But there’s no doubt Bush worked closely with the speechwriters, who were in regular contact with Rice’s staffers.
“Rice’s Staff”…surely they meant “Hadley.” The article goes on to list the people shown meeting with Bush: Matthew Scully, John McConnell, Michael Gerson and senior adviser Karen Hughes.
But the best part of all, imo, is this:
A Jan. 26 photo shows Hughes going over parts of the speech with White House Staff Secretary Harriet Miers and Director of Communications Dan Bartlett, as White House speechwriters confer behind them during a rehearsal in the family theater of the White House.
As White House Staff Secretary, one of Perkie’s primary responsibilities included “vetting every piece of paper that landed on Bush’s desk or ended up in his nightly briefing book.” Just how responsible for those 16 words was she? Is she, too, tied up in LieraqGate? That web has to be getting crowded…