Tenet: taking more heat than an oven
so tenet says the CIA will take the heat.

A couple things stand out about this:

1) Bush announced first that the CIA was to blame...before tenet did. signficance? it was coordinated, not spontaneous..its a perfect PR move...passing the hot political potato....bush says "no not me.....him" points to tenet...and? tenet points to himself "yes we are responsible"...

2)the actual statement during the State of the Union was:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

so, the president was reporting what the british had found out. how is this really an intelligence failure of the US or the CIA? really, how can we say that the CIA knew at the time that MI5 was completely out to lunch? the CIA and MI5 do not share everything, so the CIA would have to ask "what do they know?" and "how do we know its not true?"....now maybe they should have known better...maybe the cia should have been more critical...but this is a long way from saying that bush lied. that's desperate.

if the democrats attempt to turn a popular war against a monsterous tyrant into a petty disagreement about semantics, they will lose another election badly. they are DOA: hillary knows it, gore knows it and i think the independent voters know it. they've hung their hat on a loser issue.