If we are going to get huffy about "misrepresentation," we might want to consider a number of other little bits that the Left has been throwing gleefully around, regardless of whether they are factual or not, or whether they are actually quotes instead of pieces taken out of context, or even whether they are made up out of whole cloth.

The "six months to a nuclear weapon" bit is just one of these. Clipped carefully off this statement is the qualifier, "given access to weapons grade material."

With the qualifier, this statement is in fact true, and would be true for almost any technologically-capable nation. No yellowcake needed, no refining system, no huge centrifuge plants. Machine the fissile material, build it into a bomb, and there you go. The tech is out there, easily accessed, and you can hide the expert knowledge of how to do it a lot easier than you can hide a uranium refinement plant.

This briefing from September of 2002 is useful to understand where we were coming from at that point.

Notice Kay discussing how Iraq's previous nuclear program was successfully hidden from the U.N. until after the Gulf War.

"I led the teams that went into Iraq initially after the war that discovered the enrichment procedure, the Calutron, their initial centrifuge program ... The briefings we received prior to going in from national intelligence services, both in the West and in the Middle East, did not point towards any large Iraqi nuclear program," Kay said.

"Indeed, what we found was a program that had employed over 20,000 people. It cost well over $10 billion, had gone on for longer than a decade, had 24 major sites, most of which were not known prior to the war, nor were they bombed during the course of the war. It was unknown," Kay testified.

This discovery was important, Kay said, because " it should warn you how much you can know from intelligence from the outside. But secondly, it describes the task of understanding and unmasking such a program."

Kay said that in 1991, Iraq's nuclear program was not a program of facilities that could be destroyed, but rather a program of expertise. " For Iraq, by 1991, when we entered the program, their nuclear program was not a program of facilities that you could destroy. Iraq had understood, had conquered all the secrets of producing a nuclear weapon. They had understood enrichment technology and they were well on their way to very large enrichment facilities," he said.

"This is a program that is in the fabric of the society," thwarting the efforts of the intelligence community to accurately access the size of any program, according to Kay.

"They are facing some physical technical production problems, but given time and money, which they have plenty of, I don't think any of us who were there doubt that they will solve those problems" as long as Iraq's government maintains its present efforts, he said.

Kay believes Iraq does not yet possess a nuclear bomb, but based on his reading of Iraq's procurement activities, they are well on their way to producing devices in three to six years - or even "six months if they have the fissile material."

Of course, sticking this quote in Cheney's mouth, when he was obviously only repeating what he had heard from experts, is a lot more useful politically.