"Your article is interesting but dated"
Sorry, the load of misinformation from the telegraph doesn't change the fact that British Inteligence stands by their statement that Iraq attempted to buy nuke materials. It does nothing to diminish the article showing that the French knew about Iraq's attempts at buying illegal nuke material from Niger too. All the telegraph does is attempt to sully Bush over those forged documents that had nothing to do with the independently gathered intelligence showing Iraq did try to obtain nuke materials illegally from Niger.
<font size=4>Please read the following & see if you can objectively understand that Bush didn't lie & Tenet didn't try to have those 16 words removed from the State of the Union Address (that's a fact).
RICE: Wolf, let me just start by saying, it is 16 words, and it has become an enormously overblown issue (The 16 words from Bush's SOTUA - "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.").
The president of the United States did not go to war because of the question of whether or not Saddam Hussein sought the uranium in Africa. He took the American people and American forces to war because this was a bloody tyrant, who for 12 years had defied the international community, who had weapons of mass destruction, who had used them in the past, who was threatening his neighbors, and who threatened our efforts to make the Middle East a place in which you would have stability and therefore not people with ideologies of hatred driving airplanes into the World Trade Center. That's why we went to war.
This 16 words came into the State of the Union from a whole host of sources. We used unclassified sources, like the British [white] paper. There were references to this in the National Intelligence Estimate. And the State of the Union was constructed on the basis of several different documents, all of which talked about efforts to acquire uranium in Africa. Now ...
BLITZER: Let me interrupt for a moment, because three months earlier, in October, the president was going to give a speech in Cincinnati, [Ohio,] and supposedly George Tenet personally intervened and said, "don't get involved in the uranium Africa issue," and took that out of the speech.
<font size=5>RICE: What I understand is that at the time of the Cincinnati speech, there was a single report of a particular transaction, a particular arrangement, and that there were questions about that. And it was taken out of the Cincinnati speech like that. No questions asked, simply taken out.
When we got to the State of the Union, there were -- first of all, a lot of time had passed, several months. There were reports in the [National Intelligence Estimate] about other African countries. There was the British report that talked about the efforts to get uranium in Africa.
The British, by the way, still stand by their report to this very day in its accuracy, because they tell us that they had sources that were not compromised in any way by later -- in March or April -- later reports that there were some forgeries.
Now, we have said very clearly that the information went in on the basis of a number of sources, but we have a different standard for presidential speeches, which is that we don't just put in things that are in intelligence sources. We put in things that we believe the intelligence agency has high confidence in, and that's why we have a clearance process. <font size=4>
BLITZER: They didn't have high confidence in this ... That's why we had to pin it on British intelligence, as opposed to U.S. intelligence.
RICE: The British intelligence report, as far as we knew, was a report that was underpinned by reporting that was solid. We sent it out to the agency for clearance, said, "Can you stand by this?" They said, apparently, that's inconsistent. I'm understanding now that the sentence is accurate.
<font size=5>As George Tenet has said, accuracy is not the standard. Of course, the sentence was accurate. But we were asking about confidence. And George Tenet rightly says that the agency cleared the speech, it should not have been cleared with that sentence in.
And I can tell you that had there been a request to take that out in its entirety, it would have been followed immediately. <font size=3>
BLITZER: Should George Tenet resign?
RICE: Absolutely not. The president has confidence in George Tenet. This was a mistake.
<font size=4>The State of the Union process is a big process. We're checking lots and dozens and dozens of facts. It goes out for clearance. And in this case, the agency did not react to a statement that they now believe should not have been there.
But George Tenet is a fine director of central intelligence. He has fought the war on terrorism well.
And let's, again, put this in context. We're talking about a sentence, a data point, not the president's case about reconstitution of weapons of mass destruction, or of nuclear weapons in Iraq. That's based on key judgments in the National Intelligence Estimate that deal with [Saddam's] procurement network, with his training of scientists, with the fact that in 1991, he was pursuing multiple routes to a nuclear weapon.
So yes, it is unfortunate that this one sentence, this 16 words, remained in the State of the Union. But this in no way has any effect on the president's larger case about Iraqi efforts to reconstitute the nuclear program, and, most importantly, and the bigger picture, of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.
BLITZER: So you have no doubt that Saddam Hussein was trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program?
RICE: I think we had a lot of evidence going in that a procurement network, efforts to re-establish scientists, groups of scientists who had worked on the programs before, the fact that he still had the designs, the fact that he clearly had sought weapons of mass -- nuclear weapons -- in the past, that all of those things made a compelling case for nuclear reconstitution.
Now, I think now that we're in Iraq and we are interviewing scientists and we are looking at the documents and we are finding, for instance, that he had somebody bury centrifuge parts in their yard ...
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