....RICE: 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.....
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.
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.
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.....
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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