Or at least, an admission of sorts. Well, it's not really an "admission", so much as it as an acknowledgement. And, come to think of it, no one's "acknowledging" any sort of "wrongdoing", either, at least in such plain language. Furthermore, "administration official" is a pretty far-reaching term.

Ah, fuck it.

Regardless, here's today's sort-of-incriminating quote of the day, courtesy of the American ambassador to Afghanistan, as detailed in today's Chicago Tribune (reg. required):

U.S. officials promised Monday that Hussein's capture would re-energize the hunt for [Osama] bin Laden and his Al Qaeda associates and allies.

"Saddam is no longer a problem now, so bin Laden is the focus," U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said.

Phew! Good thing we got that year-long, $166-billion distraction out of the way!

In case you were becoming excitedly optimistic about locating the actual al Qaeda leader behind the events of September 11th, 2001--which launched the war on terror, which (shouldn't have) led to the sojourn in Iraq, which expanded the war on terror to include new acts of terrorism in said sojourn--consider throwing some caution to those Afghanistan winds.

...There is no reason to believe U.S. forces are any closer to finding the Saudi exile than they were when he gave them the slip in the mountains of Tora Bora in 2001.

Since then, the rumor mill has put him in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kashmir and even China. He also has been reported to be dead, from kidney disease or injuries received in the intensive U.S. bombardment of Tora Bora.

Afghan and U.S. officials said they believe he most likely is roaming the frontier straddling the Afghan-Pakistani border, home to the fiercely independent-minded Pashtun tribe.

That's quite a lengthy list of real-world, non-analogous theories. Good thing the Tribune reporter left out the entirely scurrilous rumors about bin Laden's having died and being reborn as a glorious phoenix who soars above the mountains along the border of Kashmir, bedecked in golden armor and sporting silver arrows, squawking orders to his army of terrorist changelings as they sleep, and sometimes taking side trips to Baghdad, Tikrit and the West Bank. This phoenix embodies pure evil, it is said, and never rests.

He just takes occasional naps, much like the administration's war on terror.