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MAJOR if true. Too early to tell. This is a new one and has all the earmarks of a trial balloon.

"trial balloon?"

If this is truth, why doesn't Bush just get on the air and make this public? Why does it have to be leaked to Ile Sole which is in turn quoted by AFP?

It could well be a matter of protecting sources and "methods". Intelligence (as in the institution) is rightfully paranoid about giving away what it knows. It makes our enemy's counter-espionage that much more effective -- to, in effect, know what we know about them. The first major break in being able to counter enemy intelligence is to know what they know about you.

If Sadaam knows the details about how much we know about his meeting with Atta, he then has a relatively good starting blueprint for where and how we got that information. Thus, our sources and "methods" become endangered.

This is one reason why Bush has been so closed about information up until now, and why Congressmen like Leaky Leahy are so dangerous to our nation's intelligence assets around the world. Now that we have to produce what we know in order to satisfy the appeasers and the faint-of-heart, our sources better damn well head underground in a really big hurry and hope like hell we don't delay in bringing the hammer down. Their lives are in the greatest danger -- and it gets more dangerous for them with every little iota of information that we release.

This game was pretty well understood in the Cold War, but apparently that is now too long ago for the memory of the press, at least.

"If this is truth, why doesn't Bush just get on the air and make this public? Why does it have to be leaked to Ile Sole which is in turn quoted by AFP?"

To conceal our intentions.