[ought-six]

The bottom line is that an executive must make his or her decisions based upon the evidence or information at hand, none of which is 100% fool-proof. If one were to hold out for 100% confirmation, from all sources, no decisions would ever be made.

[jethropalerobber]

The bottom line is that an executive must make his or her decisions based upon the evidence or information at hand, none of which is 100% fool-proof. If one were to hold out for 100% confirmation, from all sources, no decisions would ever be made.

that's a pretty poor excuse for foisting what was known to be weak intel on the nation in SOTU with the lame disclaimer "or so the brits say." this bit about obtaining uranium from africa was never, at least accord to tenet's statement, the strongest evidence of a nuclear reconstitution program in iraq. it was little more than a footnote in the NIE.

why would the president use the weakest part of the intelligence picture to make his case? can anyone here answer that question?

exceprt of tenet's statement:
"In October, the Intelligence Community (IC) produced a classified, 90-page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's WMD programs. There is a lengthy section in which most agencies of the intelligence community judged that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Let me emphasize, the NIE's key judgments cited six reasons for this assessment; the African uranium issue was not one of them."