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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (3250)	7/11/2003 2:56:07 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

Bush Blames CIA for State of Union Error URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42004-2003Jul11.html By Dana Milbank Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, July 11, 2003; 12:39 PM ENTEBBE, Uganda, July 11 – President Bush and his national security adviser today placed full responsibility on the Central Intelligence Agency for the inclusion in this year's State of the Union address of an erroneous allegation that Iraq's Saddam Hussein was trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa. At a brief stop here in Uganda, the fourth nation on Bush's five-nation trip, Bush defended his use of the false allegation in the January speech by saying the speech "was cleared by the intelligence services." In repeated questions this week, Bush has avoided any statement on the accuracy of the allegation, although his spokesmen have acknowledged that the charge was wrong and should not have been included in the State of the Union address. "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services," Bush said after a meeting with Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni. "And it was a speech that detailed to the American people that dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime. And my government took the appropriate response to those dangers. And as a result, the world is going to be more secure and more peaceful." Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was more specific in pinning responsibility on the CIA for approving the allegation, which involved a claim that Hussein was seeking "yellow-cake" uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency told the U.N. Security Council in March that the claim was based on forged documents. "I can tell you, if the CIA, the director of Central Intelligence, had said, take this out of the speech, it would have been gone, without question," Rice said in a briefing aboard Air Force One en route to Uganda from South Africa. Rice said, "There was even some discussion on that specific sentence, so that it reflected better what the CIA thought. And the speech was cleared." "The agency cleared the speech and cleared it in its entirety," Rice said. Senior administration officials said on Thursday that the CIA tried unsuccessfully in early September 2002 to persuade the British government to drop from an official intelligence paper the reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa. At that time, the CIA was completing a classified national intelligence estimate on Iraq's weapons programs that mentioned alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from three African countries but warned that State Department analysts were questioning its accuracy when it came to Niger. The CIA paper's summary conclusions did not include references to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa. In addition, various news organizations reported Thursday that CIA officials involved in the discussions before Bush's speech was drafted questioned whether his statement was too strong, because of doubts about the British intelligence. The allegation was left in the speech but attributed to British intelligence. Rice said yesterday that "some specifics about amount and place were taken out" of the speech after the objections were raised. The remarks today by Rice and Bush follow a similar but less forceful statement by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Thursday. Some administration officials believe the CIA has been trying to distance itself from the allegation. Democratic lawmakers have called for public hearings into how the administration handled intelligence related to Iraq. Rice said Bush "absolutely" had confidence in CIA Director George Tenet. "We wouldn't put anything knowingly in the speech that was false; I'm sure they wouldn't put anything knowingly in the speech that was false," she said. "In this case, this particular line shouldn't have gotten in because it was not of the quality that we would put into presidential speeches." Rice discussed the issue for nearly an hour on Air Force One. Asked about the CIA efforts to discourage the British from making the claim, Rice said: "If there were doubts about the underlying intelligence in the NIE" -- the National Intelligence Estimate that mentioned yellow cake -- "those doubts were not communicated to the president." She said the only mention of doubts was in a "standard INR footnote, which is kind of 59 pages away from the bulk of the NIE." INR is the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. "If there was a concern about the underlying intelligence there, the president was unaware of that concern, as was I," Rice said. A senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Rice had called Tenet before she gave her briefing. The official said Tenet was sent a final version of Bush's State of the Union address before it was delivered. The official said "a valuable lesson" had been learned about vetting Bush speeches. © 2003 The Washington Post Company