available here. It addresses the point very well.

The president's critics are lying. Mr. Bush never claimed that Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium from Niger. It is not true — as USA Today reported on page one Friday morning — that "tainted evidence made it into the President's State of the Union address." For the record, here's what President Bush actually said in his SOTU: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Precisely which part of that statement isn't true? The British government did say that it believed Saddam had sought African uranium. Is it possible that the British government was mistaken? Sure. Is it possible that Her Majesty's government came by that belief based on an erroneous American intelligence report about a transaction between Iraq and Niger? Yes — but British Prime Minister Tony Blair and members of his Cabinet say that's not what happened.

They say, according to Britain's liberal Guardian newspaper, that their claim was based on "extra material, separate and independent from that of the US."

In fact, according to this article, the British still stand by the claim.

As for the Congressional Record being some form of "official record" of what really happens in Congress, history has shown that idea to be laughable. If you look at a copy of the Congressional Record, you'll find all sorts of things in the "official record" that never happened. There will be speech transcripts of speeches never given to Congress and other transcripts that were "revised and edited" after the fact to make various congressmen look better. As an authoritative document of what happens in Congress, the Congressional Record has been somewhat a joke for a long time.

Regarding your statement, If a piece of information is only a guess, a responsible person would leave it out of a speech of this magnitude and save it for a less official venue to reveal to the public and the press.

Contrary to spy novels and Hollywood fantasies, virtually ALL intelligence reports are "only a guess." You have a bunch of people trying to piece together information as best they can. The information comes from others who are deliberately trying to conceal their motives and actions. It is far from a science. Back in the Cold War days, "Kremlinologists" often tried to determine who was in and out of favor in the Soviet Union by such things as analyzing the order of dignitaries in a photograph as they watched the annual May Day Parade. Such techniques are still said to be used for China.