A separate Guardian story alleging the Robert Ludlum-esque "Waldorf transcripts" of a February conversation between Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, in which they express grave doubts about the intelligence, has been denied by Straw, who says he wasn't even in New York's Waldorf Hotel on the day of the alleged conversation. The story was "completely untrue," Straw said. Notably, the Guardian hadn't actually obtained a copy of the "Waldorf transcripts," but rather had been told of them by "diplomatic sources."

On Thursday, the Guardian seemed to retract the story, writing that "Straw has now made it clear that no such meeting took place. The Guardian accepts that and apologises for suggesting it did."

A less clear-cut situation presents itself with the Vanity Fair story, which was hyped by the magazine's skilled publicists as Wolfowitz "contradicting the Bush administration" by telling the magazine "that weapons of mass destruction had never been the most compelling justification for invading Iraq." But a closer read of the Wolfowitz interview transcript -- provided by the Department of Defense -- reveals this to be a bit of overhype. Wolfowitz also said that "for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but ... there have always been three fundamental concerns." Those were Iraq's WMD, support for terrorism and the "criminal treatment of the Iraqi people."

Wolfowitz's assertion that the WMD issue was focused on for reasons having to do with the "bureaucracy" may be "the height of arrogance," as Korb assesses. But it doesn't seem like the scandalous "contradiction" with Bush policy promised by the magazine.

Similarly, the magazine's assertion that by removing Saddam the U.S. could withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia was similarly hyped as an "unnoticed but huge" reason for the war. But Wolfowitz, according to the transcripts, said that such a withdrawal was an "unnoticed -- but it's huge" difference from prewar geopolitics. "Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government," not to mention "a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda," Wolfowitz said, and "lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things."

Other reports are more nebulous and hard to determine. At the Central Intelligence Agency, director George Tenet insisted in a May 30 statement that "integrity and objectivity" marked "exactly what was done and continues to be done on intelligence issues related to Iraq." But the New York Times reported on Wednesday that the CIA has launched an internal review to determine whether its intelligence officers miscalculated the threat posed to the U.S. by the Iraqi WMD program. One CIA official suggests to Salon that the Times is the one exaggerating. "There is a review going on," she confirms, but insisted it originated from an agreement between Tenet and Rumsfeld before the war started. "It's just good government to review."

While it doesn't seem as if any of this has yet changed domestic politics -- Bush has a 64 percent approval ratings, according to a May 30-June 1 Gallup poll, with 56 percent agreeing that the war was "justified even if the U.S. does not find conclusive evidence that Iraq had WMD" -- some Democratic presidential candidates have begun expressing concern, and even outrage.

On Thursday, presidential candidate Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, D-Ohio, organized 29 other Democratic members of Congress to introduce a resolution in an attempt to force the administration to turn over the intelligence relating to Iraqi WMD. In California, another candidate, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla. -- former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- said "it would raise serious questions about the political leadership that engaged in that manipulation and the misleading of the American people."

Both Kucinich and Graham voted against the Iraq war resolution, which gave the president authority to wage the overseas effort. But even war resolution supporter Sen. John Edwards, D-NC, expressed some reservations about this issue on Saturday in Iowa. "I think people in this country are going to be entitled to an explanation," he said, adding that if in the end "we haven't found the weapons we need to figure out why."

Far more outspoken is Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who for months has been asking the administration how it could have used forged information that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger in its own dossier, up to the point that President Bush referenced the argument in his January 2003 State of the Union address. While others are focused on the chemical and biological WMD, Waxman tells Salon that he is convinced that without the fear that Saddam was close to obtaining nuclear weapons the U.S. would not have fought the war in Iraq. "The most powerful argument that President Bush made to take the country to war was that Iraq was soon to become a nuclear power and that would change things dramatically -- Saddam Hussein would have the ability to blackmail other countries in the region and it also meant that any other kind of military action we might have to take against them in the future would be far more serious," Waxman says. "It was the reason, quite frankly, that brought me to vote for the resolution."

Waxman has sent the administration several letters in order to find out "if the president was given information his intelligence people knew to be false" or whether "he was willing to ignore the information and go out and make a statement he knew to be false. Or there's some third explanation." The subsequent response from a "low-level" State Department employee "said something to the effect that, 'We were aware that this is not accurate information, but when we heard other countries repeating it we thought they knew something we didn't know. But later, we found out it was based on the same thing. But we acted in good faith.'" In any case, American and British troops are ramping up their searches -- the U.K. just sent 100 of its elite soldiers, many of them expert in interrogation, to the region, while the U.S. is looking forward to the arrival on Friday of an International Atomic Energy Agency inspection team to see if any uranium is missing from the looted Tuwaitha nuclear complex. Hundreds of sites have yet to be searched, there are prisoners who remain to be interrogated. It may well be that the discovery of the WMD is just a matter of time.

Unfortunately for the U.S., that won't likely put an end to the dispute. On Thursday, Hans Blix, the former United Nations chief arms inspector, cast some doubt on the coalition inspection teams. Says Blix, "Anybody who functions under an army of occupation cannot have the same credibility as an independent inspector."

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