Thursday, August 25, 2005

The War of the Inadvertenly Separated Text Box

It appears that all the flapadoodle about the Niger Uranium is now being laid at the feet of a Text Box. Yes indeed, the pertinent Text Box was apparently "Inadvertently Separated." Here, courtesy of a lead from our stalwart colleague Redjalapeno to the LA Times we have:
The national intelligence estimate on "Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction," released in October 2002, was meant to reflect a consensus of the nation's intelligence-gathering agencies. It included the consensus view that Iraq sought weapons of mass destruction and a description of Britain's account of the Niger deal.

The British information went unchallenged in that chapter of the intelligence estimate. But the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, disagreed with much of the nuclear section of the estimate and decided to convey its views in text boxes to highlight the dissent.

However, the text box on the African uranium claim was "inadvertently separated" and moved into another chapter of the intelligence estimate, where it could be overlooked, the Senate Intelligence Committee said.

A couple of months later, a White House speechwriter consulted the estimate while preparing the State of the Union speech, according to one source familiar with the process.
So, do we believe that this immoral War was started and justified because of a frigging Inadvertenly Separated Text Box?

We have been living in Never Never Land for almost five years.

Why Not?

2 comments:

Redjalapeno said...

Rather disgusting eh?

Anonymous said...

Just one problem with that - if you know anything about the file formats used in (what I assume was ms-word) it is intuitively implausible.

Text boxes are funny things. Part graphic part text.

Word maintains an index of changes, who changed what, when, were, on which machine. Let's see the file and its indices.

Then I'll believe it.