White House Credibility Defense Shifting
Associated Press

Monday 21 July 2003

WASHINGTON -- The White House defense of President Bush's now-disavowed claim that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa has evolved over the last two weeks: blame others, stonewall, bury questions in irrelevant information and, above all, hope it will go away.

So far, none has worked.

In question: 16 words in Bush's Jan. 28 State of the Union speech: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

At issue: the credibility of the president's allegation that Saddam was rebuilding a nuclear weapons program. The assertion that Iraq was trying to buy uranium was a key component of that claim -- and a key piece of Bush's justification for war.

The flap started on July 6, when an envoy sent by the CIA to Africa last year to investigate the uranium claim contended that the Bush administration ignored -- and possibly manipulated -- his findings. In a New York Times op-ed article, Joseph Wilson, former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, said it was highly doubtful that any transaction took place.

The next day, the White House acknowledged that Bush should not have made the claim because of concerns about the intelligence behind it. The documents allegedly showing an Iraq-Niger uranium connection turned out to be forgeries.

Then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tried to shut down the story in its tracks, insisting it was old news.

In a way, it was.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice had said almost a month earlier that Bush was wrong to include the uranium claim in his speech, but that the White House had not known about intelligence doubts until afterward. Her acknowledgment received little attention.

That changed with Wilson's statements. Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail demanded an investigation into whether Bush purposely exaggerated intelligence.

With its press staff unable to quell the controversy, the White House brought in bigger guns -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, Rice, the president himself and even, later, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

But, after two weeks, a White House usually adept at controlling stories merely by dismissing questions and waiting them out has had no luck.

The central questions -- asked over and over -- were not changing:

* Who knew what when -- especially the president?
* Why was it so important to include the statement in the speech?
* Who was responsible for putting it in?
* Why has the president refused to take responsibility for uttering it?

Only the White House's explanations shifted -- often contradicting themselves in the process.

There was the "no big deal" approach. Four days into the controversy, as Bush was dogged with questions while visiting Africa, Powell said there was no intention to deceive and called the outcry "overwrought and overblown and overdrawn." His defense was a bit backhanded -- the president's statement, he said, had been determined to be "not totally outrageous."

With that tack unsuccessful, the next day was blame the CIA day.

First Rice, then Bush pointed fingers at the CIA for not removing the claim while vetting the speech. CIA Director George Tenet, back in Washington, completed the well-scripted mea culpa by accepting full responsibility and absolving Bush.

But Democrats still weren't letting it go.

Rice appeared on three Sunday talk shows to offer a new explanation: Bush's remark was technically accurate because he correctly described what the British government had reported.

And who knows, Fleischer emphasized the next day, the British could be right. "We don't know if it's true," he said, "but nobody -- but nobody -- can say it is wrong."

Scott McClellan, who succeeded Fleischer as chief spokesman, also tried to dismiss questions. Over four days, he told reporters 20 times that the particular question they were asking had already been "addressed."

On July 16, he said claims of White House exaggeration were "nonsense" and accused skeptics of trying to "politicize this issue by rewriting history." He read five-year-old statements by Democratic Sens. John Kerry -- now running for president -- and Carl Levin urging action to confront Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction.

At the same time, the White House tried to redirect the debate onto the overall danger posed by Saddam's chemical and biological weapons -- uranium or not -- and onto Bush's resolve in acting to confront that threat.

With that came the Bush and Blair show, first with Blair's speech to a joint meeting of Congress last Thursday and then at a news conference with the president.

The two leaders defended their decision to go to war and said their prewar claims about Iraq's weapons would ultimately be proven right.

On Friday came the document dump.

The White House took the rare step of declassifying and releasing eight pages of the 90-page top-secret National Intelligence Estimate that was used to write the questioned portions of the State of the Union address.

But instead of putting a lid on the controversy, the documents were likely to raise more questions -- as they also showed prewar divisions within the U.S. intelligence community. The State Department, for instance, termed the reports that Saddam was shopping for uranium in Africa "highly dubious."

As for Bush, he has addressed the matter only in broad terms, saying he is confident in his decision to go to war. Once, he praised the intelligence he relied on as "darn good."

"We will find the truth," Bush said beside Blair. "And that'll end all this speculation."

Only time will tell.

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Senators: Bush Credibility Rests in Probe
Associated Press

Monday 21 July 2003

The credibility of President Bush and the nation are at stake with the information that led the United States into the Iraq war, two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee say.

Investigations under way by the committee's staff, the CIA and the FBI marked a good beginning, Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition."

"Ultimately, the public needs to be reassured that, in fact, the intelligence the president was given ....(and) was used, and how he framed the debate and the decision to go into Iraq, was intelligence that they can have confidence in," Hagel said.

"And that's, by the way, important for the world to have that same confidence in our word."

A crucial question will be to determine how Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28 came to include a reference to what U.S. intelligence had determined was an incorrect British report that Iraq was shopping for uranium in Africa.

"There are plenty of investigations, and the question is, what's the point of them?" said Rockefeller, the intelligence committee's vice chairman. "The point of them is to find out if we were being misled, if somebody inserted that in" despite earlier objections by CIA Director George Tenet.

On "Fox News Sunday," Rockefeller said Bush could make the controversy go away by coming clean whether the justification for war was exaggerated. "It's just a question of was it right, or was it wrong?" he said.

Rockefeller said the argument should not be personalized or politicized. Because of Bush's policy of maintaining the right of pre-emptive attacks against potentially dangerous governments, he said, "intelligence is the basis now of war-fighting."

Therefore, Rockefeller said, "it's very important to intelligence to say that facts really do matter, they count, they have to be accurate."

Rockefeller told CNN he requested FBI involvement in the case after the International Atomic Energy Agency debunked the British report. He and Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., requested CIA and State Department investigations. The House Intelligence Committee is conducting its own probe.

Hagel said ensuring that the American public and the world have confidence in the word of the United States "is the essence of the exercise here."

Defending the administration, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said the decision to include the 16-word Iraqi uranium-shopping sentence "was made by the speechwriters and by the folks in the White House" using various intelligence sources that were thought reliable.

White House officials have acknowledged the report should not have appeared in the speech and have issued varying versions of why it was. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has said no top White House officials knew of a report by a CIA emissary that said the report appeared to be bogus.

But Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, a Democratic presidential candidate, said intelligence was available that should have made Bush realize the information in the uranium report was suspect. One source was Vice President Dick Cheney, he told CBS' "Face the Nation."

"The vice president is the one who went to the CIA on several occasions. He asked specifically for additional information on the Niger-Iraq connection. The United States sent an experienced ambassador, who came back after a full review with a report that these were fabricated documents," Graham said.

"You cannot tell me that the vice president didn't receive the same report that the CIA received, and that the vice president didn't communicate that report to the president or national security advisers to the president."