He’s going to punt a Reagan. He’ll stand there and say that he is still sure in his heart that there is a connection between Al Queda and Iraq, but all the evidence points otherwise, and therefore a mistake was made (passive voice deliberate). He will sorrowfully admit that he was misled, but won’t name by whom, leaving the implication that his only fault was in being too trusting. Quietly, it will leak out that he means Tenet, but in a noble display of loyalty, he will publicly deny that.
He will then announce that that settles that, and its time to move on.
Yes, the passive voice detachment with an air of somberness and regret expressed as though one were talking about a completly different person other than oneself. Just think of what Bill Clinton could have done with this technique:
“Mistakes were made and a president was blown. It is my understanding that a dress was jizzed upon. These things are regrettable but I will work to see that any such incidents are prevented in the future.”
We would have bought it and moved on. At least I would have bought it.
That bit of obfuscation is nice, because now the “ties” can be between anyone with any connection to the “regime” and anyone else with a connection to “terrorism”. They are moving the ball away from the “Saddam” link to “Al Qaeda”.
We do I have the feeling that on election night 2004, I’ll be dropping to my knees, looking up at the sky and uttering the slowest motionest, longest, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooo… in the history of our universe?
“A pair of British-recruited spies in Iraq whose alarming reports of Saddam Hussein’s illicit weapons were rushed to the White House shortly before the U.S.-led invasion last year, were never interviewed by the CIA and are now viewed as unreliable, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say…”
Here’s the punch line…
“…U.S. analysts also erred in their analysis of high-altitude satellite photos, repeatedly confusing Scud missile storage places with the short, half-cylindrical sheds typically used to house poultry in Iraq. As a result, as the war neared, two teams of U.N. weapons experts acting on U.S. intelligence scrambled to search chicken coops for missiles that were not there.
“We inspected a lot of chicken farms,” said a former inspector who asked not to be identified because he now works with U.S. intelligence. His U.N. team printed “Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team” on 20 gray T-shirts to mark the futile hunt…”
This stuff would be hilarious, if it weren’t for all the corpses.
“The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda,” Bush told reporters after a Cabinet meeting at the White House."
Everything has a relationship with everything else. The US has a relationship with al Qaeda.
I’d say that the quote you provided is easily interpretted as a ‘negative pregnant,’ also known as a ‘not-lie.’