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Bush scapegoats cia for iraq error { July 12 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45901-2003Jul11.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45901-2003Jul11.html
Bush, Rice Blame CIA for Iraq Error
Tenet Accepts Responsibility for Clearing Statement on Nuclear Aims in Jan. Speech
By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 12, 2003; Page A01
President Bush and his national security adviser yesterday placed full responsibility on the Central Intelligence Agency for the inclusion in this year's State of the Union address of questionable allegations that Iraq's Saddam Hussein was trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa.
The president defended use of the allegation by saying the Jan. 28 speech "was cleared by the intelligence services."
Within hours of Bush's comments, CIA Director George J. Tenet accepted blame for allowing the allegations into the Jan. 28 address, saying the information "did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed."
The extraordinary statements yesterday were part of a coordinated Bush administration effort to end a controversy over whether the president and his top officials have misled the public and Congress in their prewar assertions about Hussein's attempts to rebuild his nuclear weapons program. They also amounted to a rare public rebuke from the president for a senior adviser.
Tenet, in a prepared statement that had been in the works for two days, said the CIA approved the State of the Union speech before it was delivered. "I am responsible for the approval process in my agency," he said. "The president had every reason to believe the text presented to him was sound."
However, the CIA director also made clear that it was members of the president's National Security Council staff who proposed including the questionable information in drafts of the Bush speech, although the CIA and the State Department had already begun questioning an alleged attempt by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger. It subsequently turned out that the allegation was in part based on forged documents.
Tenet noted that even before the White House proposed including the information in Bush's January speech, the agency had kept it out of other public speeches by government officials and congressional testimony because "we had questions about some of the reporting." Tenet did not mention speeches from which it was removed, but other administration sources said yesterday one was Bush's Oct. 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati in which he outlined the threat that he said Saddam Hussein posed to the United States and world peace.
Yesterday's statements represented the administration's most extensive accounting of how the questionable allegation found its way into the president's State of the Union address, a key element of the U.S. effort to build the case for war against Iraq. In that speech, the president said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Including that sentence in the speech, Tenet said, "was a mistake."
While the British government has stood by the claim, U.S. intelligence officials have subsequently acknowledged that they harbored doubts about the statement months before the speech. This week, for the first time, White House aides admitted that the claim was based on questionable intelligence and should not have been included in the speech.
The admission has sparked a new round of calls from Democrats for a broader investigation of Bush's use of intelligence than the more limited inquiries that have been launched in both the House and Senate. But Republicans have defended the administration and yesterday, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, pointedly questioned Tenet -- not the White House.
"So far, I am very disturbed by what appears to be extremely sloppy handling of the issue from the outset by the CIA," Roberts said in a statement. He added that it was Tenet's job to have told the president directly about his concerns about the material in his speech as Bush's senior intelligence adviser and not have left that job to his subordinates.
"What now concerns me most, however, is what appears to be a campaign of press leaks by the CIA in an effort to discredit the president," Roberts said.
On the fourth day of a trip to Africa, Bush and his aides worked yesterday to contain political damage from the episode. Until yesterday, Bush had avoided any statement on the accuracy of the uranium allegations, leaving that for aides.
"I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services," Bush said after a meeting with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. "And it was a speech that detailed to the American people that dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime. And my government took the appropriate response to those dangers. And as a result, the world is going to be more secure and more peaceful."
Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, offered more specifics. "I can tell you, if the CIA, the director of central intelligence, had said 'take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone, without question," Rice said in a briefing aboard Air Force One en route to Uganda from South Africa. Instead, after some changes sought by the agency were made, "the agency cleared the speech and cleared it in its entirety," she said.
When initial drafts mentioning Niger and the alleged attempts to buy uranium came to the CIA, Tenet said, agency officials told the White House about the "fragmentary intelligence" behind the allegations. The language was changed to remove Niger and the size of the alleged purchases, Rice indicated, to satisfy the CIA.
Rice made clear that Tenet's approval came after the White House had made these changes and attributed the information to the British. That was possible because the British has already published a September 2002 dossier concluding that Iraq "sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" for a possible nuclear weapons program.
Tenet said yesterday that CIA officials should not have agreed with the White House that it was "factually correct" to put the information in the speech just because the British dossier had included it. "This should not have been the test for clearing a presidential address," Tenet said.
Tenet confirmed in his statement a Washington Post report that the CIA tried unsuccessfully in September 2002 to persuade the British government to drop the reference to Africa uranium purchases in the dossier. At that time, the CIA was completing a classified national intelligence estimate on Iraq's weapons programs that mentioned alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from three African countries, but the agency warned that State Department analysts were questioning its accuracy when it came to Niger. The conclusions in the CIA paper did not include references to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa.
Rice discussed the issue for nearly an hour on Air Force One. Asked about the CIA efforts to discourage the British from making the claim, Rice said: "If there were doubts about the underlying intelligence in the NIE" -- the National Intelligence Estimate that mentioned "yellow cake," a term for uranium ore -- "those doubts were not communicated to the president." She said the only mention of doubts was in a "standard INR footnote, which is kind of 59 pages away from the bulk of the NIE." INR is the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
"If there was a concern about the underlying intelligence there, the president was unaware of that concern, as was I," Rice said.
She said Secretary of State Colin L. Powell did not include the uranium allegation in the speech he gave to the United Nations on Feb. 5, eight days after the president spoke. She said that was because INR had questioned the matter. Neither Powell nor other State Department officials questioned its inclusion.
Rice said Bush "absolutely" had confidence in Tenet. "We wouldn't put anything knowingly in the speech that was false; I'm sure they wouldn't put anything knowingly in the speech that was false," she said. "In this case, this particular line shouldn't have gotten in because it was not of the quality that we would put into presidential speeches."
Milbank reported from Entebbe, Uganda.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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