NYTimes.com Article: Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House S

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by tganesh@stlawu.edu.


Sanger uncovers more of the lies and deception - but to what avail?  What 
effects will these revelations have?  Are they adequate to count in the coming 
elections?  For whom?  Such useless questions...

tganesh@stlawu.edu

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Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House Says

July 8, 2003
 By DAVID E. SANGER 




 

WASHINGTON, July 7 - The White House acknowledged for the
first time today that President Bush was relying on
incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American
intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the
Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase
uranium from Africa. 

The White House statement appeared to undercut one of the
key pieces of evidence that President Bush and his aides
had cited to back their claims made prior to launching an
attack against Iraq in March that Mr. Hussein was
"reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program. Those claims
added urgency to the White House case that military action
to depose Mr. Hussein needed to be taken quickly, and could
not await further inspections of the country or additional
resolutions at the United Nations. 

The acknowledgment came after a day of questions - and
sometimes contradictory answers from White House officials
- about an article published on the Op-Ed page of The New
York Times on Sunday by Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former
ambassador who was sent to Niger, in West Africa, last year
to investigate reports of the attempted purchase. He
reported back that the intelligence was likely fraudulent,
a warning that White House officials say never reached
them. 

"There is other reporting to suggest that Iraq tried to
obtain uranium from Africa," the statement said. "However,
the information is not detailed or specific enough for us
to be certain that attempts were in fact made." 

In other words, said one senior official, "we couldn't
prove it, and it might in fact be wrong." 

Separately tonight, The Washington Post quoted an
unidentifed senior administration official as declaring
that "knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's
attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been
included in the State of the Union speech." Some
administration officials have expressed similar sentiments
in interviews in the past two weeks. 

Asked about the statement early today, before President
Bush departed for a six-day tour of Africa, Ari Fleischer,
the White House spokesman, said, "There is zero, nada,
nothing new here." He said that "we've long acknowledged"
that information on the attempted purchases from Niger
"did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect." 

But in public, administration officials have defended the
president's statement in the State of Union address that
"the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa." 

While Mr. Bush cited the British report, seemingly giving
the account the credibility of coming from a non-American
intelligence service, Britain itself relied in part on
information provided by the C.I.A., American and British
officials have said. 

But today a report from a parliamentary committee that
conducted an investigation into the British assertions also
questioned the credibility of what the government of Prime
Minister Tony Blair had published. 

The committee went on to say that Mr. Blair's government
had asserted it had other evidence of Iraqi attempts to
procure uranium. But eight months later the government
still had not told Parliament what that other information
was. 

While Mr. Bush quoted the British report, his statement was
apparently primarily based on American intelligence - a
classified "National Intelligence Estimate" published in
October of last year that also identified two other
countries, Congo and Somalia, where Iraq had sought the
material, in addition to Niger. 

But many analysts did not believe those reports at the
time, and were shocked to hear the president make such a
flat, declarative statement. 

Asked about the accuracy of the president's statement this
morning, Mr. Fleischer said, "We see nothing that would
dissuade us from the president's broader statement." But
when pressed, he said he would clarify the issue later
today. 

Tonight, after Air Force One had departed, White House
officials issued a statement in Mr. Fleischer's name that
made clear that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush's
statement. 

How Mr. Bush's statement made it into last January's State
of the Union address is still unclear. No one involved in
drafting the speech will say who put the phrase in, or
whether it was drawn from the classified intelligence
estimate. 

That document contained a footnote - in a separate section
of the report, on another subject - noting that State
Department experts were doubtful of the claims that Mr.
Hussein had sought uranium. 

If the intelligence was true, it would have buttressed
statements by Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that
Saddam Hussein was actively seeking a nuclear weapon, and
could build one in a year or less if he obtained enough
nuclear material. 

In early March, before the invasion of Iraq began, the
International Atomic Energy Agency dismissed the uranium
reports about Niger, noting that they were based on forged
documents. 

In an interview late last month, a senior administration
official said that the news of the fraud was not brought to
the attention of the White House until after Mr. Bush had
spoken. 

But even then, White House officials made no effort to
correct the president's remarks. Indeed, as recently as a
few weeks ago they were arguing that Mr. Bush had quite
deliberately avoided mentioning Niger, and noted that he
had spoken more generally about efforts to obtain
"yellowcake," the substance from which uranium is
extracted, from African nations. 

Tonight's statement, though, calls even those reports into
question. In interviews in recent days, a number of
administration officials have conceded that Mr. Bush never
should have made the claims, given the weakness of the
case. One senior official said that the uranium purchases
were "only one small part" of a broader effort to
reconstitute the nuclear program, and that Mr. Bush
probably should have dwelled on others. 

White House officials would not say, however, how the
statement was approved. They have suggested that the
Central Intelligence Agency approved the wording, though
the C.I.A. has said none of its senior leaders had reviewed
it. Other key members of the administration said the
information was discounted early on, and that by the time
the president delivered the State of the Union address,
there were widespread questions about the quality of the
intelligence. 

"We only found that out later," said one official involved
in the speech. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/08/international/worldspecial/08PREX.html?ex=1058706420&ei=1&en=a9fe7da1b927dfde


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