I suspect that its partisan "journalism" striking again. In any case, the report is nonetheless helpful to the president on the issue because it helps counter the "Bush Lied" argument.

Two items are still puzzling though:

1. Assuming Saddam did try and buy the yellowcake, what was he planning on doing with it? It has now pretty much been concluded that Saddam had no nuclear weapons program (yes there were some plans for one found, but no evidence that anything had been put in place or even started). So Saddam having this material would be of no use to him directly since he would need a lot of sophisticated equipment to process it. Maybe he was planning to sell it to another country who had the technology to process it. But the countries likely to buy it already have sophisticated nuclear programs where the yellow cake would have been child's play (North Korea, Pakistan). Maybe terrorist's could use it to turn it into a dirty bomb? I don't know whether this is technologically possible or likely, and so far there is no "slam dunk" connections between Saddam and terrorists. In some ways, more questions are raised by Lord Butler's report on this subject than answered.

2. If the intelligence community had reasonable evidence tha Saddam did this (outside of the faked documents of course), why then did the Bush administration come out so strongly and say that it was absolutely wrong for them to have included the reference in the state of the union speech. I don't recall the words exactly when they retracted the yellowcake point, but the Bush administration's words left little doubt that Saddam did not try to buy the yellowcake.

Maybe this was another example of the left hand of the Bush administration not knowing what the right hand was doing. In other words, one scenario that can be imagined is that when Wilson created a media feeding frenzy, Rove said the only way to stop it was to come out and say the speech was wrong (yet they did this without making sure that was the case). In any case, it's perplexing and worrisome that the Bush administration seems so confused on this issue.