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Today's NY Times (I think it's true [img]graemlins/1ponder.gif[/img] ) [img]tongue.gif[/img]
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Bush and Rice Say C.I.A. Approved Uranium Comment
By KIRK SEMPLE
President Bush said today that intelligence agencies had approved the assertion he made in his State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear material from Africa.
The president made his comments during a four-hour visit to Uganda, the fourth country in his five-nation tour of Africa. He spoke shortly after his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the C.I.A had authorized the specific wording of the statement..
``I gave a speech that was cleared by the intelligence services,'' the president said. ``It was a speech that detailed to the American people the dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime. And my government took the appropriate response to those dangers.''
The comments by Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice appeared intended to rebut news reports that said the C.I.A. was raising objections to the claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Africa. The Washington Post reported today that the C.I.A. tried to persuade the British governmnent to drop a reference to the purported deal from an official intelligence paper. And a report broadcast by CBS News late Thursday said that the White House had ignored a request by the C.I.A. to remove the statement from the State of the Union address.
The White House acknowledged this week that it had erred in including the statement in the State of the Union address because it was based on faulty intelligence. The claim was in part based on forged documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger.
Ms. Rice told reporters en route from South Africa to Uganda that the C.I.A. had approved the contents of the State of the Union address before Mr. Bush delivered it in January.
``The C.I.A. cleared the speech in its entirety,'' Ms. Rice said in a nearly hour-long interview aboard the president's plane. ``If the C.I.A. - the director of Central Intelligence - had said, `Take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone.''
Critics, including some Democrats on Capitol Hill, have accused the Bush administration of misleading the public by overstating the weapons threat posed by Iraq in order to garner more support for a war against Saddam Hussein.
The White House has faced questions about the uranium purchase for months. On Sunday, The New York Times published an article on its Op-Ed page by Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador who was sent last year to Niger, West Africa, to investigate reports of the attempted purchase. Mr. Wilson, who said he was dispatched after Vice President Dick Cheney's office took an interest in the matter, reported back that the intelligence was likely fraudulent.
Ms. Rice said the specific reference to African uranium had been scrutinized by the C.I.A.
``There was even some discussion on that specific sentence, so that it reflected better what the C.I.A. thought and the speech was cleared,'' she told reporters this morning.
In particular, she said, the agency raised an objection to a reference to Iraq's trying to obtain ``yellow-cake'' uranium. ``Some specifics about amount and place were taken out,'' she said, but that once those changes were made, ``the speech was cleared.''
Ms. Rice said that the State Department's intelligence agency had expressed reservations about the information on the African uranium but that the general consensus among the intelligence agencies was that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa.
In his State of the Union speech in January, Mr. Bush said: ``The International Arms Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990's that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five differnt methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.''
Since coalition troops invaded Iraq, they have found no biological or chemical weapons.
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