Bobby Eberle
Rice Takes Questions on Iraq-Uranium Controversy
Fri Aug 1 16:32:43 2003
64.140.158.181

Rice Takes Questions on Iraq-Uranium Controversy
By Bobby Eberle
Talon News August 1, 2003
http://www.gopusa.com/news/2003/august/0801_rice_interview.shtml

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that she takes personal responsibility for the "entire episode" involving the insertion of a line of text in President Bush's State of the Union Address regarding Saddam Hussein and uranium purchases in Africa.

Speaking on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Dr. Rice explained the process by which references to Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium in Africa were removed from an October speech by the president in Cincinnati but were included in his State of the Union Address.

"[In the Cincinnati] speech, a line had been there about the uranium issue and Saddam Hussein seeking uranium in Africa," Rice said. "And [CIA] Director Tenet had called Steve Hadley and he told him ... I don't think you should put that in the President's speech because we don't want to make the President his own fact witness. Both Steve and Director Tenet remember the conversation in that way."

Dr. Rice added, "What we learned later, and I did not know at the time and certainly did not know until just before Steve Hadley went out to say what he said last week, was that the Director had also sent over to the White House a set of clearance comments that explained why he wanted this out of the speech. I can tell you, I either didn't see the memo, I don't remember seeing the memo -- the fact is, it was a set of clearance comments, it was three-and-a-half months before the State of the Union."

"And we're going to try to have a process now in which we don't have to depend on people's memories to link what was taken out of the speech in Cincinnati with what was put into the speech at the State of the Union," Dr. Rice said.

In referring to the "clearance" memo sent by CIA Director George Tenet to Rice's deputy, Steve Hadley, Dr. Rice said, "If the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, is not going to stand by something, if he doesn't think that he has confidence in it, we're not going to put that into a presidential speech. We have no desire to have the President use information that is anything but the information in which we have the best confidence, the greatest confidence."

"And so when Director Tenet said, take it out of the speech, I think people simply took it out of the speech and didn't think any more about why we had taken it out of the speech," Rice added.

When asked about the clearance process between the CIA and the National Security Council for the content of presidential speeches, Rice said, "In this one case, the process did not work."

"We did have a clearance from the agency, but, frankly, looking back, perhaps we should have remembered that it was taken out of the Cincinnati speech. We simply didn't," Rice said.

"And what I have assured the President, and what I want to assure myself, is that our future processes will be ones in which we double check to make sure that something has not been taken out of a speech, in which perhaps we get an affirmative answer from the principals that they, in fact, will stand behind an element of a speech as important as the State of the Union," Rice added.

Rice said that this incident has detracted from the "very strong case" that the president has been making regarding Iraq.

"There are people who want to say that somehow the President's case was not strong, the intelligence case was not strong. I've read a lot of intelligence cases over my almost 20 years now in this field, and this was a very strong case," Rice said.

In referring to specific intelligence regarding Iraq and its nuclear weapons development program, Rice said that five of the six intelligence agencies [in the National Intelligence Estimate] believed that Saddam Hussein was active in the "reconstitution of his nuclear weapons program."

"And one has to remember that this is against the context of someone who had in 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, been proven to be much closer to a nuclear weapon than the International Atomic Energy Agency had thought," Rice said. "He had been seeking nuclear weapons for a long time, this didn't happen in a vacuum."

Rice continued, "In that context, judgments by the intelligence community that he was reconstituting his programs, that he had an active procurement network, that he was gathering together nuclear scientists, that he had several designs for a nuclear weapon and that, left unchecked, he might be able to have a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade -- that's the judgment on which the President was going, and not the question of whether or not he was trying to acquire yellow cake in Africa."

Copyright © 2003 Talon News -- All rights reserved.
==========================================================

Graham: Bush Paying Off 'Oil Buddies'
Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), who has already called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, continued Thursday to attack the president -- this time on his plan to drill in the Rocky Mountains.
Read more...
http://www.gopusa.com/news/2003/august/0801_graham.shtml