I'm certainly glad George W. Bush didn't lie to us.

I mean the us right here in Cincinnati. I can't vouch for what he says to the rest of the world, but when he comes to our town, the president is mighty careful about what comes out of his mouth.

Standing in the echoing rotunda of Cincinnati's Union Terminal last Oct. 7, the president spoke with passion about why we needed to go to Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Bush had come to Cincinnati because he was looking to make an important speech deep in America's heartland. Cincinnati offered a solid Midwestern backdrop and an audience of willing and believing faces. (There were about 2,000 protesters outside, but the orchestrated crowd inside the terminal was definitely supporting the president.)

The speech came as Congress was debating whether to give Bush the authority to do the job. He laid out the case against Saddam to the Cincinnati audience but the message clearly was meant for those back in Washington.

"When I spoke to the Congress more than a year ago, I said that those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves. Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction. And he cannot be trusted," the president said.

He said there was direct evidence of Iraq training members of al-Qaida to make bombs. He said Saddam had repeatedly ignored United Nations inspection demands about destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

"It (Iraq) possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism, and practices terror against its own people. The entire world has witnessed Iraq's 11-year history of defiance, deception and bad faith," the president said. We should not wait for "final proof," of such weapons, he said. "The smoking gun could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

He even said "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression."

He did not say that Iraq had already tried to buy uranium in Niger, even though the administration had heard that rumor. But there were questions about whether that report was true. I guess the president's intelligence and political advisors kept it out of the speech because nobody wanted to mislead the people of Cincinnati by stretching the facts in a way that would have made a frightening story just a little bit scarier. It's a good thing, too. It turns out that claim is probably completely wrong and based on some forged documents that were meant to fool - well, somebody.

Yet the bogus uranium claim did manage sneak by the CIA, the national security adviser and every political proofreader on the president's staff to get into Bush's State of the Union address just three months later.

That little slip of the tongue is now bedeviling the administration. CIA Director George Tenet has taken the blame, publicly saying he neglected to thoroughly edit the president's speech. Tenet appeared before a closed-door meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday to explain just how he let 16 words known to have suspicious origins slip through the nation's security net.

I sympathize with the president on this one. I depend on copy editors all the time and it's terribly embarrassing when they don't correct my mistakes before they get into print.

There are plenty of people upset that the president's State of the Union statement has turned out to be "inoperative" (to borrow a description from another administration). Lots of Democratic presidential hopefuls, and even a few Republican senators, are claiming the uranium story was a breech of trust by a president who was trying to get the nation psyched up for war.

I don't go quite that far. Bush had the nation, or at least Congress, convinced that we should go to war against Saddam long before the State of the Union. His speech hypers should have just gone back and cribbed another line from his October address in Cincinnati: "The time for denying, deceiving and delaying has come to an end."

That wowed 'em in Cincinnati. And every word of it was true.

Contact David Wells at 768-8310; fax: 768-8610; e-mail: dwells@enquirer.com. Cincinnati.Com keyword: Wells.