Our President has found a new fall guy:

President Bush's number two national security aide on Tuesday took blame for a controversy over charges Iraq tried to buy African uranium, saying the CIA had warned him earlier that intelligence cited by Bush was suspect.

Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser, said he should have deleted a reference to Iraqi attempts to buy African uranium from Bush's State of the Union speech in January, because the CIA had asked him to remove similar language from an October speech by the president.

"It is now clear to me that I failed in that responsibility," Hadley told reporters. White House communications director Dan Bartlett said.

We hope people view Hadley's admission for what it is: a weakattempt to fall on his sword for the Administration. The responsibility for the SOTU address is not his, but the President's. That's where the buck stops. Bush should be ashamed of not stepping up to the plate and acknowledging his own responsibility.

Update: The dissembling continues. Read this Washington Post article:

The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material in Africa, White House officials said yesterday.

....Yesterday's disclosures indicate top White House officials knew that the CIA seriously disputed the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa long before the claim was included in Bush's January address to the nation. The claim was a major part of the case made by the Bush administration before the Iraq war that Hussein represented a serious threat because of his nuclear ambitions; other pieces of evidence have also been challenged.