It's just another day for the Bush administration's constantly changing story about the reasons we went to war with Iraq, huh?

First of all, you remember all the hub-bub about the fellow who hid the centrifuge parts under his rosebush?

Well, hilariously, even he says the administration is wrong about those aluminum tubes:

The White House, for instance, has cited the case of nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi, who recently dug up plans and components for a gas centrifuge that he said he buried in 1991 at the end of the Persian Gulf War. The White House has pointed to the discovery as a sign of Hussein's continuing nuclear ambitions, but Obeidi told his interrogators that Iraq's nuclear program was dormant in the years before war began in March.

The sources said Obeidi also disputed evidence cited by the administration -- namely Iraq's purchase of aluminum tubes that various officials said were for a new centrifuge program to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs. Obeidi said the tubes were for rockets, as Iraq had said before the war.

CIA analysts do not believe he has told the whole truth, said one Bush administration official. Obeidi has left Iraq under CIA auspices after being arrested briefly by U.S. Army troops.

No wonder we haven't heard anything from the W propaganda machine about this guy recently. His story doesn't fit the administration's agenda now. In fact, the administration has found damn-near nothing in its interrogations of Iraqi scientists who, quite honestly, have no reason to lie to us now. I do hope something hasn't happened to this fellow in"protective CIA custody" since April. We all know just how careful the military and CIA are in interrogations these days, right?

Josh Marshall has a great post on this here.

While you're there, you really ought to read this post as well. It's a great one about how W and the administration is now trying to pretend this war wasn't about existing WMDs at all, it was all about discovering evidence that Saddam EVER HAD ANY weapons programs:

You can see where this is going, can't you? This is really great-moments-in-goal-post-moving. Saddam had a weapons program.

And how can you believe he didn't have a weapons program, when he actually used the weapons from his weapons programs, albeit fifteen years ago.

This isn't just a slip of the tongue or a Bushism. This is where we're going. As the White House now wants to define it, the question is whether Iraq ever had a weapons program. Or, to put it more precisely, whereas some people are foolish enough to believe that the standard is whether Saddam actually still had the weapons programs we know he once had, the real standard is whether Saddam actually once had the weapons programs we know he once had.

This is too silly to even talk about. Everybody knows that's not what we're talking about.

Indeed. Isn't it astonishing that these guys were telling us all only four short months ago that there were thousands of gallons of dangerous and deadly chemical and biological weapons in Iraq -- and now they're reduced to this level of silliness in order to justify the earlier story about the war?

I don't know. Maybe the average American will fall for this -- they've bought stories almost as ridiculous from this adminstration before -- but I seriously doubt it.

Nice try though.

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