The White House clearly hoped that Hadley's generous mea culpa closed the book on Yellowcakegate. Maybe, along with Cheney's AEI speech, it will. But Hadley's account leaves a dangling thread. Can you spot it? Tenet's Oct. 6 memo elaborating on why it was dumb, in the Cincinnati speech, to make reference to Saddam's purported yellowcake safari, came, Hadley says, after Hadley had already agreed to take the reference out. (Hadley's exact words: "[B]y this time, by draft eight, the reference to Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium has already been deleted from the speech, as DCI Tenet asked me to do in his telephone request.") Tenet is a very busy man—too busy, we now know, to bother vetting the president's State of the Union address himself, a lapse that required him to render an elaborate and somewhat embarrassing apology. Yet Tenet was not too busy in October to filibuster Hadley by memo on the yellowcake howler after Hadley had removed the yellowcake howler from the speech. Why wouldn't Tenet let go of Hadley's lapel?

Because, Chatterbox submits, Tenet knew (or perhaps just guessed) that someone else would try to overrule Hadley and put the yellowcake howler back in. Was that someone else Cheney or Libby?