MORE BAD NEWS FOR BUSH: White House No. 2 security adviser admits getting memos from CIA on uranium
msnbc.com
WASHINGTON, July 22 — White House officials acknowledged Tuesday that they received two CIA memos in October raising doubts about intelligence claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium in Africa, an allegation since proven false that President Bush trumpeted in his State of the Union address three months later.
THE ASSERTION that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” was a key part of Bush’s case for going to war with Iraq.
The president’s credibility was called into question after it emerged that the documents on which the claim was based, since obtained by NBC News, were forgeries. As Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress called for investigations of the intelligence-gathering that led Bush to make the claim, CIA Director George Tenet accepted responsibility this month for the CIA’s decision to clear the passage, saying it was strictly true that British intelligence had made the uranium claim.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has convened hearings on the dispute.
The White House insisted for a while that the CIA did not know that the intelligence was faulty until after Bush made his address in January. But NBC News reported this month that the CIA had, in fact, successfully persuaded the White House to remove the claim from a speech Bush delivered Oct. 7 in Cincinnati, three months earlier.
NBC News reported that it was Tenet himself who alerted deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley that the claim was dubious before the speech in October.
‘I DON’T RECOLLECT THEM’
Tuesday, Hadley disclosed that he had found two CIA memos dated Oct. 5 and 6, one addressed to him and the other to speechwriter Michael Gerson, raising doubts about claims from British intelligence that Iraq was seeking uranium in the west African country of Niger.
White House officials said Tuesday that the memos slipped through the cracks and did not indicate that administration officials sought to mislead the public in the buildup to the war in Iraq, as critics, including some of the nine Democratic presidential candidates, have suggested.
“As a senior-most official at the [National Security Council], the president and NSC adviser [Condoleezza] Rice looked to me, and I failed that responsibility,” Hadley said at a briefing for reporters, adding that he was “pretty sure I read [the memos], but I don’t recollect them.”
White House sources told NBC News that Hadley was “beside himself.” A senior source said Hadley offered his resignation, but Bush would not accept it.
The sources said Bush remained confident in Rice, Hadley and Tenet.
RELIEF FOR TENET?
The disclosure could relieve some of the pressure on Tenet, who was described as having “fallen on his sword” when he issued a statement saying it was the CIA’s fault that Bush made the false statement in his State of the Union address. It establishes that CIA officials did warn the White House well in advance that the allegation was questionable and should not be relied upon.
Other fallout from the episode continues to dog the White House, however.
NBC News reported Monday that a retired diplomat who investigated the uranium claim last year had accused the administration of retaliation because he publicly challenged its accuracy.
The retired diplomat, Joseph Wilson, said the White House deliberately leaked his wife’s identity as a covert CIA operative, damaging her career and compromising past missions, after he criticized the administration on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and in The New York Times.
“It’s a shot across the bow to those who might step forward. Those unnamed analysts who said they were pressured by the White House, for example, would think twice about having their own families’ names being dragged through this particular mud,” Wilson told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.
The White House denied Wilson’s accusation. |
