retracting those 16 words from SOTU

* heres something thats really funny, but i had forgotten. wilson's op-ed was july6, and the maladministration pulled the SOTU's 16 words the following day. hadley and tenet and rove had been working on the retraction for at least a few days. no problem there.

a week later, the NYT ran an article titled: "The story changes yet again: Bush aides now say claim on uranium was accurate." The story begins:

"Senior Bush administration officials today adjusted their defense of President Bush's claim in his State of the Union Address that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa, insisting that the phrasing was accurate even if some of the underlying evidence was unsubstantiated.

Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in separate appearances on Sunday television talk programs that the disputed sentence in Mr. Bush's January speech was carefully hedged, enough that it could still be considered accurate today.

While continuing to acknowledge, as the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency did last week, that the phrase should not have been uttered, they emphasized today that the British had indeed, as Mr. Bush said, reported Iraq's interest in acquiring African uranium.

In his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, Mr. Bush contended that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop a nuclear bomb. Among elements he cited to make his case was a statement that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Ms. Rice, in an appearance on "Fox News Sunday," said that "the statement that he made was indeed accurate. The British government did say that."

And Mr. Rumsfeld said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" that "it turns out that it's technically correct what the president said, that the U.K. does — did say that — and still says that. They haven't changed their mind, the United Kingdom intelligence people."

On the ABC News program "This Week," Mr. Rumsfeld added that "it didn't rise to the standard of a presidential speech, but it's not known, for example, that it was inaccurate. In fact, people think it was technically accurate."

The legalistic defense of the phrasing seemed to signal a shift in the White House's strategy in dealing with the political fallout over Mr. Bush's public use of evidence that was based in part on fabricated documents and in part on uncorroborated reports from abroad.

It came after a week in which the White House first repudiated the statement and then blamed the Central Intelligence Agency for allowing Mr. Bush to make it. On Friday, George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence, accepted responsibility, saying "these 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.""

What a shambles! It took them a week to fall back on the 'technically correct' story - even though the 16 words were deliberately couched to be technically correct *and* they had at least 2 months to prepare their response! it appears that the message masters really were off their game that week. perhaps they were too busy commiting treason to think about the message.

in other news, at least they had considered how to downplay the issue (thnx, frank luntz) and tried to ameleorate the problem to '16 words' - even though the term '16 words' has subsequently become famous - and shorthand for a lot of what is wrong with these horrible people...