Republicans Anonymous

Mr. Bush apparently wants this bit of history rewritten:

Prelude to a Leak
Gang fight: How Cheney and his tight-knit team launched the Iraq war, chased their critics—and set the stage for a special prosecutor's dramatic probe.
By John Barry, Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball

...Cheney had long distrusted the apparatchiks who sat in offices at the CIA, FBI and Pentagon. He regarded them as dim, timid timeservers who would always choose inaction over action. Instead, the vice president relied on the counsel of a small number of advisers. The group included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and two Wolfowitz proteges: I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, and Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's under secretary for policy. Together, the group largely despised the on-the-one-hand/on-the-other analyses handed up by the intelligence bureaucracy. Instead, they went in search of intel that helped to advance their case for war.

Central to that case was the belief that Saddam was determined to get nukes—a claim helped by the Niger story, which the White House doggedly pushed...
(Source: Newsweek, Oct. 31, 2005 [emphasis added.])

Only the rigid "scripting" of W's public appearances by his Bush League minions keeps questions like "How can you claim your administration didn't distort pre-war Iraq intelligence when Vice President Dick Cheney set up the Office of Special Plans for the express purpose of distorting such intelligence?