Whereas the efforts of international weapons inspectors, United States intelligence agencies, and Iraqi defectors led to the discovery that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and a large scale biological weapons program, and that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program that was much closer to producing a nuclear weapon than intelligence reporting had previously indicated; From JOINT RESOLUTION 114 October 10, 2002 Read this in total for the first time and you will be amazed at the detail of the lie.

BUSH moves to "PASS THE BUCK" Resident refuses responsibility.
Cites "DARN GOOD" intelligence - at least "they are smarter than I is."
"Who lied in George Bush's State of the Union speech" is big mystery in WHODUNIT
Condi is officially toast states THE LIKELY STORY and Notes from Atlanta has a great switch on the Clinton phrasing. Lean Left has a different lie covered, and Prometheus Speaks has simply "moved on"

"When you've got the world by the balls, just squeeze."

From Rice's appearance today on CNN's Late Edition:
BLITZER: Supposedly, it [request to send Wilson] came at the request of the vice president.
RICE: No, this is simply not true, and this is something that's been perpetuated that we simply have to straighten out. The vice president did not ask that Joe Wilson go to Niger. The vice president did not know. I don't think he knew who Joe Wilson was, and he certainly didn't know that he was going. ..They did not brief it to the president, the vice president or any senior officials.

From a newly-released article in Time:
When it got to Washington, the Iraq-Niger uranium report [the forged documents] caught the eye of someone important: Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, told TIME that during one of his regular CIA briefings, "the Vice President asked a question about the implication of the report." Cheney's interest hardly came as a surprise: he has long been known to harbor some of the most hard-line views of Saddam's nuclear ambitions. It was not long before the agency quietly dispatched a veteran U.S. envoy named Joseph Wilson to investigate.
Is Cheney hanging Condi out to dry?
FROM SADLY NO
Joseph Wilson was "the Deputy Chief of Mission, the acting ambassador at the US Embassy in Iraq 12 years ago during Desert Shield, the lead-up to the first Gulf War." Vice-President Cheney was "Secretary of Defense from March 1989 to January 1993, [and] directed [...] Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East." Wilson was the last US diplomat in Iraq, and met with Hussein and several high ranking diplomats after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. And somehow we're supposed to believe Cheney might not have known who Wilson was? I don't think so.
The 16 words are also covered by The Blue Bus and Catalyst
So that chiding White House official was right: there was more to the picture. But I'm afraid the bigger the picture gets, the more it looks like a pattern of dishonesty.

Bush's position was at odds with those of his own aides, who acknowledged over the weekend that the CIA raised doubts that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger more than four months before Bush's speech. The president's assertion that the war began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring.
For a complete workup on the sordid "PASS THE BUCK" affair this is an excellent source.

WHY THERE IS A GREATER DOWNSIDE TO THE URANIUM LIE.
(cry wolf in IRAQ and who will help cover the real threat in NK?)
North Korea Says It Has Made Fuel for Atom Bombs

North Korean officials told the Bush administration last week that they had finished producing enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear bombs, and that they intended to move ahead quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior American officials said today. The new declaration set off a scramble in American intelligence agencies — under fire for their assessment of Iraq's nuclear capability — to determine if the North Korean government of Kim Jong Il was bluffing or had succeeded in producing the material undetected. Covered in more detail by Billmon">BILLMON and Blah 3