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White House 'Warned Over Iraq Claim'
BBC News
Wednesday 09 July 2003
The CIA warned the US Government that claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions were not true months before President Bush used them to make his case for war, the BBC has learned. Doubts about a claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the African state of Niger were aired 10 months before Mr Bush included the allegation in his key State of the Union address this year, a CIA official has told the BBC.
On Tuesday, the White House for the first time officially acknowledged that the Niger claim was wrong and suggested it should not have been used in the president's State of the Union speech in January.
But the CIA official has said that a former US diplomat had already established the claim was false in March 2002 - and that the information had been passed on to government departments, including the White House, well before Mr Bush mentioned it in the speech.
Both President Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair mentioned the claim, based on British intelligence, that Iraq was trying to get uranium from Niger as part of its attempt to build a nuclear weapons programme.
Mr Blair is under fire from British MPs about the credibility of a dossier of evidence, which set out his case for war.
And in the US, increasing doubts are being raised about the American use of intelligence.
Forged Documents
In his keynote speech to Congress in January, the President said: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
But the documents alleging a transaction were found to have been forged.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer appeared to concede on Tuesday that the uranium claim in the State of the Union address was based on inaccurate information.
"The president's statement was based on the predicate of the yellow cake [uranium] from Niger," Mr Fleischer said.
"So given the fact that the report on the yellow cake did not turn out to be accurate, that is reflective of the president's broader statement."
But a former US diplomat, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, went on the record at the weekend to say that he had travelled to Africa to investigate the uranium claims and found no evidence to support them.
Now the CIA official has told the BBC that Mr Wilson's findings had been passed onto the White House as early as March 2002.
That means that the administration would have known nearly a year before the State of the Union address that the information was likely false.
In response, a US Government official told the BBC that the White House received hundreds of intelligence reports every day.
The official said there was no evidence that this specific cable about uranium had been passed on to the president.
But in Congress, Democrats are demanding a full investigation into the intelligence that underpinned the case for war.
They have demanded to know if President Bush used evidence that he knew to be weak or wrong.
British Undeterred
The British Government has stood by its assertion, saying the forged documents were not the only evidence used to reach its conclusion that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Africa.
On Tuesday Mr Blair defended the assessment, telling a committee of MPs that it was not a "fantasy" and that the intelligence services themselves stood by the allegation.
"The evidence that we had that the Iraqi Government had gone back to try to purchase further amounts of uranium from Niger did not come from these so-called 'forged' documents, they came from separate intelligence," Mr Blair said.
However, Mr Blair did not specify what that separate intelligence was.
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Bush Charge on Iraq Arms Had Doubters, House Told
By David E. Sanger and Carl Hulse
The New York Times
Wednesday 09 July 2003
WASHINGTON, July 8 — The State Department told a Congressional committee today that seven days after President Bush gave his State of the Union address, in which he charged that Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase uranium in Africa, American diplomats warned the International Atomic Energy Agency that the United States could not confirm the reports.
The State Department letter, provided to Representative Henry A. Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Government Reform, confirms that there were deep misgivings in the government about some intelligence Mr. Bush cited in his January speech.
On Monday the White House said for the first time that the evidence that Iraq sought nuclear fuel in Africa was not credible enough, and should not have been included in the president's remarks.
Nonetheless, White House officials declined today to reveal how the charge made it into Mr. Bush's speech. And they argued, in further statements that went beyond those issued from Air Force One on Monday, that the uranium issue was one of many pieces of evidence indicating that Iraq was seeking to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.
The White House acknowledgment that it had used flawed intelligence came nearly six months after the speech, and after weeks of arguments here and in Britain over the justification for the invasion of Iraq. Today it touched off a new series of accusations between Democrats and Republicans over whether the administration had deliberately skewed the evidence, or, as the Democrats argued, withheld information that would have cast doubt on the intelligence.
Democrats seized on the admission as new justification for a full-scale investigation.
"It's a recognition that we were provided faulty information," Tom Daschle, the senate Democratic leader, told reporters. "And I think it's all the more reason why a full investigation of all of the facts surrounding this situation be undertaken, the sooner the better."
Republicans said the White House had been "forthright" in making the admission and they pointed to the risks of using intelligence from other nations. Mr. Bush had cited British intelligence reports on the uranium, but that report was at least in part based on American reports.
"Obviously, when you use foreign intelligence, you — we don't have necessarily as much confidence or as much reliability as you do your own," said Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate. "It has since turned out to be, at least according to the reports that have been just released, not true. The president stepped forward and said so. I think that's all you can expect."
The State Department's letter came in response to a statement provided to Mr. Waxman by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body that monitors nuclear activity. The agency said it had sought information in December to back up American charges that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium in Niger.
The initial intelligence was provided to Congress in late October. But it was not until Feb. 4, a week after Mr. Bush spoke, that the administration provided documents to the I.A.E.A. to back up its charges.
The I.A.E.A. quickly concluded that the documents the United States had turned over to support Mr. Bush's claims were fraudulent. But even in turning over the material, the State Department told the organization, "We cannot confirm these reports and have questions regarding some specific claims."
That statement appears to show that serious doubts about the intelligence were present early on, but Mr. Bush also cited other evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program.
Michael N. Anton, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said today, "The documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger were not the sole basis for the line in the president's State of the Union speech that referred to recent Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Africa."
He said that at the time a "national intelligence estimate" cited "attempts by Iraq to acquire uranium from several countries in Africa," adding, "We now know that documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger had been forged."
Mr. Bush never mentioned Niger by name in his speech. But without the Niger evidence, the argument that Iraq was intent on getting uranium from Africa did not hold up.
Mr. Anton noted today that "other reporting that suggested that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa is not detailed or specific enough for us to be certain that such attempts were in fact made.
"Because of this lack of specificity," he continued, "this reporting alone did not rise to the level of inclusion in a presidential speech. That said, the issue of Iraq's attempts to acquire uranium from abroad was not an element underpinning the judgment reached by most intelligence agencies that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."
That judgment was highly controversial, with the State Department's intelligence unit and the Energy Department arguing that the evidence was murky at best. Republicans, however, insisted today that if the president made a very public mistake, it was not a consequential one.
"It's very easy to pick one little flaw here or one little flaw there," said Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the second-ranking Republican leader in the House of Representatives. "The overall reason we went into Iraq was sound and morally sound. And it's not just because somebody forged or a made a mistake on whether Saddam Hussein was looking for nuclear material from Niger or whatever."
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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