White House Points at CIA Over Iraq Uranium Charge
By Randall Mikkelsen
ENTEBBE, Uganda (Reuters) - The White House pointed the finger at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) on Friday over a false accusation that Iraq (news - web sites) tried to buy African uranium.
President Bush (news - web sites) said his charge Iraq tried to buy nuclear material from Africa was approved by his "intelligence services," and U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) said the specific wording was approved by the CIA (news - web sites).
But Rice said the White House "absolutely" had confidence in CIA Director George Tenet, saying he had served "very well."
The White House acknowledged this week it had been a mistake to say Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had been trying to get African uranium because documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger proved to have been forged.
Bush repeated he had been right to go to war against Saddam, but declined to answer a reporter's question as to how the erroneous statement made it into his State of the Union address in January.
"I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services," Bush said in Uganda, where he was meeting President Yoweri Museveni as part of a five-nation African tour.
"It speaks in detail to the American people of the dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime. My government took the appropriate response to those dangers," he told reporters.
CIA APPROVED WORDING
Reflecting an attempt by the White House to defend Bush against criticism that he misled the public, Rice earlier held a lengthy session with reporters on the uranium issue, saying the CIA approved the address in advance.
"The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety... If the CIA Director of Central Intelligence had said, 'take this out of the speech', then it would have been done," Rice told reporters flying to Uganda from South Africa on Air Force One with Bush.
Critics have accused the Bush administration of a campaign to mislead the public by hyping a weapons of mass destruction threat posed by Iraq.
U.S. television network CBS reported on Thursday the White House had ignored a request by the CIA to remove the accusation from Bush's address.
But Rice said the specific reference to African uranium had been scrutinized by the CIA.
"There was even some discussion on that specific sentence, so that it reflected better what the CIA thought and the speech was cleared," Rice said.
"Some specifics about amount and place were taken out...with the change in that sentence, the speech was cleared."
Rice said Tenet had been a "terrific DCI (Director of Central Intelligence)."
"I am really not blaming anybody," she told reporters.
Rice said although Bush's statement about the uranium had cited British intelligence, the "underlying intelligence" for the British document was in the official U.S. National Intelligence Estimate.
She said the State Department's intelligence agency had expressed reservations about the uranium information in a separate footnote to the document, but that the larger intelligence conclusion was that there was reason to believe Iraq was trying to obtain uranium in Africa.
Rice said no one had expressed any doubts to Bush about the information underlying the National Intelligence Estimate, a report that has input from the 13 U.S. spy agencies and includes consensus and dissenting opinions. |
