That depends on what your defninition of "Iraq purchased uranium from Niger" is...

The new spin the White House is trying to put on Yellowcakegate is worthy of Bill Clinton, only about something much worse than a cute chubby intern. Now they're saying it isn't a lie, because they did have the intelligence. But the quality of the intelligence itself is a completely different matter.

WASHINGTON July 13 —
Administration officials insisted Sunday that President Bush's disputed statement about Iraqi uranium shopping in Africa was accurate, even while conceding anew it should have been deleted from his State of the Union address.

Both Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, said the United States and Britain have intelligence that supports the contention that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.

But both also said the intelligence falls short of the elevated standards necessary for a presidential address. They said CIA Director George Tenet had struck a similar but more narrowly focused assertion from a Bush speech in Cincinnati three months earlier.

I'm sorry, but this just reaches new levels of ridiculous. Let's examine how far that intelligence fell short of the elevated standards necessary for a presidential address, shall we?

Sources said that one of the documents was a letter discussing the uranium deal supposedly signed by Niger President Tandja Mamadou. The sources described the signature as "childlike" and said that it clearly was not Mamadou's.

Another, written on paper from a 1980s military government in Niger, bears the date of October 2000 and the signature of a man who by then had not been foreign minister of Niger in 14 years, sources said.

I think that falls short of the level of standards required on a fake note a high-schooler might write to get out of school that day, let alone a presidential address. (Thanks to Buzzflash for the link.) Let's again at something from that first article.

They said CIA Director George Tenet had struck a similar but more narrowly focused assertion from a Bush speech in Cincinnati three months earlier.

Three months earlier, during a speech in Cincinnati, they realized there might be some problems with that assertion. No offence, Cincinnait, but I think the State of the Union address should have higher levels of standards for accuracy than a speech in that city.

To quote John Stewart, it's like they think we're retarded.