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CIA approved Bush remarks on Iraq
Fri Jul 11 17:13:21 2003
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CIA approved Bush remarks on Iraq
President Bush remains confident in his intelligence agencies, a top adviser said. Click "Play" for more on the Iraq dispute.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/937524.asp?0dm=H11RN

ENTEBBE, Uganda, July 11 — Amid rising doubt about intelligence information that led to the war against Iraq, the administration continued its defense Friday of President Bush’s case for military action. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the CIA approved Bush’s State of the Union speech in January in its entirety, including a passage — now labeled false — alleging that Iraq was looking to buy uranium from Africa.

IF CIA DIRECTOR George Tenet had any misgivings about that sentence in the speech, “he did not make them known” to Bush or his staff, Rice told reporters Friday on Air Force One.
Thursday, the Senate agreed to an amendment that would authorize a “thorough and expeditious joint investigation” into assertions that Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Africa and would require parts of that inquiry to be made public. The amendment was added to a bill to authorize State Department spending, which the Senate could approve as early as next week.

DOCUMENT A FORGERY
Questions about the allegation in Bush’s January speech have followed him on his five-day trip through Africa. The White House said this week that it had been a mistake to insert the claim, which the United Nations determined in February was based primarily on forged documents initially obtained by European intelligence agencies.

In the past week, senior U.S. officials have said U.S. intelligence officials expressed doubts about
a public statement British officials made on Sept. 24, citing intelligence sources, that said Iraq “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Bush cited the British report in his address Jan. 28.

U.S. officials said their doubts dated to early 2002, when a retired diplomat asked by the CIA to investigate the reports went to Niger and spoke with officials who denied having any dealings with Iraq.

The Washington Post reported Friday that those doubts were relayed to British officials and that word was passed to several U.S. agencies before Bush spoke.

Bush mentioned the report in his address anyway, a decision the White House has defended strongly.

Rice, who senior U.S. officials said had consulted with Tenet, said Friday that “the CIA cleared the speech in its entirety.” The agency raised only one objection to the sentence, which involved an allegation that Iraq was trying to obtain yellow cake uranium, she said.

“Some specifics about amount and place were taken out,” Rice said. “With the changes in that sentence, the speech was cleared. The agency did not say they wanted that sentence out.”

BUSH STILL CONFIDENT IN CIA

During the meeting with reporters as Bush flew from South Africa to Uganda, Rice emphasized that “if the CIA — the director of central intelligence — had said, ‘Take this out of the speech,’ it would have been gone. We have a high standard for the president’s speeches.”

If anyone at the CIA had doubts about the veracity of the uranium-Iraq allegation, Rice said, “those doubts were not communicated to the president.”
Asked whether Bush had confidence in the intelligence agency, she replied, “Absolutely.”

Rice acknowledged, however, that Secretary of State Colin Powell had his own reservations about the report and chose not to mention the allegations in his presentation to the U.N. Security Council a few days later.

Rice said the State Department’s intelligence division considered the uranium-purchasing allegations dubious. The caution was noted in a footnote in the intelligence assessment given to Bush, she said.
Powell, however, did not discuss his misgivings with her or anyone on her staff between the time of the State of the Union address and his presentation to the United Nations, she said.

DEMOCRATS DEMAND PROBE
Democrats this week accused Bush of misleading the public about the need for war in Iraq. One of them, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, introduced a bipartisan non-binding resolution Thursday night calling for an investigation.
“The credibility of our president is on the line, and I believe that he should move forward as quickly as possible to call for a full investigation,” Durbin said. “We should be able to point to those people responsible for putting that misleading language in the State of the Union address. They should be held accountable, and they should be dismissed.”
Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, one of nine Democrats running for president, released a statement warning that the White House “cannot and should not play fast and loose with our intelligence information.”

“Quite simply, we need to know what people in the administration knew about the weakness of our uranium intelligence reports and when they knew it.”

Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Bob Graham of Florida, two of Lieberman’s challengers for the Democratic nomination, made similar statements Thursday, while former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has made the issue a centerpiece of his campaign.

Other criticism has focused on Bush’s larger contention that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s government had chemical and biological weapons and was working to build more of them, in addition to developing nuclear bombs. No such weapons have been found in Iraq.

Critics also attacked the administration’s current characterizations of the situation in Iraq after Army Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the overall war effort, told a House panel Thursday that U.S. troops might have to remain for four years.

NBC’s David Gregory and The Associated Press contributed to this report

SEE: BREWING STROM

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, foreground, in the Oval Office with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney earlier this month.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/937576.asp?0cv=NA01

July 11 — The familiar drip, drip, drip of a brewing political scandal echoes through the power centers of Washington and London these days as the Bush administration and the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair are pelted daily with increasingly pointed questions about the case they made for going to war against Iraq. The admission that the president made an apparently false allegation against Iraq in his State of the Union address was supposed to help put the issue to rest. Instead, it reopened fissures inside the administration and in Blair’s government over the validity of their case for war.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/NEWS_Front.asp?0dm=N---N 

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