On Tue, 13 Jun 2006 Jon_Lincicum at stream.com wrote: > Is this statement by Kiera in /Orca/ about Verra's foresight not our "best > available knowledge" of the subject? Vlad may consider himself to have learned something, but I think we have to have a higher standard than believing X because Y told Z. > Majikjon > -Missing the reference to "16 words", and it sounds like interesting > reading. OT and political: This refers to the implied claim by President Bush in his State of the Union message from '03 that the Brits knew Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Africa. The admin subsequently retracted the statement, though the Blair govt stands by it. It is believed that the formulation "The British govt has learned X" was used because there was too much insistence in our govt that we had no evidence for X, but it was true that the Brits claimed X. There was a great deal of unhappiness about "learned" under the view of its meaning expressed earlier.