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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:29
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From the NY imes of today. If only the admin. hired better staff, maybe some that understood reading comprehension, thing would all be better:
quote:
C.I.A. UPROAR
White House Tells How Bush Came to Talk of Iraq Uranium
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, July 18 — The White House today set out its most detailed explanation yet of how disputed intelligence about Iraq's weapons program made it into President Bush's State of the Union address, contradicting a crucial element of the version of events provided by the Central Intelligence Agency.
In a briefing for reporters, a senior administration official said the White House had changed an initial draft of the speech to make it more credible by attributing the assertion that Iraq had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa to a public British intelligence dossier.
The official said the change had been made after internal White House deliberations about the best way to present the information and not, as intelligence officials have said, in response to concerns raised by the C.I.A. about the credibility of intelligence reports that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium in Niger.
As part of today's briefing, the White House declassified part of its main prewar intelligence summary on Iraq's weapons programs. The document, a National Intelligence Estimate, encompasses the findings of the main intelligence agencies. The document noted reports that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in Africa but included a warning from the State Department that the reports were "highly dubious."
White House officials said the document was one of those drawn on by speechwriters as they put together the State of the Union address. The official who gave the briefing today said Mr. Bush was unaware of the State Department's skepticism.
The president "is not a fact checker," the official said.
The document also noted that the intelligence agencies had "low confidence" in some of its conclusions, including when Saddam Hussein might use weapons of mass destruction, whether he would try to attack the United States and whether he would provide chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda. Administration officials had cited all those possibilities in building a case for the war.
In a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee last October, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, said Mr. Hussein "probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions" if he were attacked. But Mr. Tenet did not write that his agency had a low level of confidence in its ability to form such an assessment.
In his State of the Union address, on Jan. 28, Mr. Bush made a case for why Iraq was a threat to the Mideast, the United States and the world.
He referred to what he said were attempts by Iraq to rebuild its nuclear weapons program and said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
But the reliability of the intelligence reports was later undermined when letters that had been a critical part of the evidence turned out to have been forged. This month the White House said it had been a mistake to include the assertion.
The White House held the briefing today and declassified part of the intelligence findings in an effort to quell a political furor over whether Mr. Bush misled the American public by exaggerating the threat from Iraq. Democrats have been using the issue to question Mr. Bush's credibility not only on the war but also on domestic policy issues.
The administration's latest account left some questions unanswered and raised some new ones.
The White House's account left unresolved exactly why Mr. Bush included the reference to uranium. Not only had the State Department expressed misgivings, but the C.I.A. had expressed reservations to British authorities before Britain published its intelligence dossier last fall, according to Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary.
In particular, the administration's account of how it settled on the wording in Mr. Bush's speech was at odds with accounts from the C.I.A.
The senior administration official said the White House originally drafted the speech to say "we know" a series of things about Mr. Hussein's weapons programs, like "We know that Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin," and "We also know that he has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa."
The decision to mention uranium came from White House speechwriters, not from senior White House officials, the official said.
The official said that on the day before the speech, the White House team drafting it "decided that it would be much more credible if we could explain to the public how we knew it — not just assert it, but to fully disclose as much as possible how we knew this information."
As a result, the official said, the speech was changed to attribute each statement to a specific source.
The official said that Bob Joseph, the director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council, then asked the C.I.A. to approve that portion of the speech. "It was cleared to use the British as a citation," the official said.
The intelligence agency did not mention to Mr. Joseph that it pushed Britain not to use the uranium information in its public document, the official said.
The C.I.A. has provided a different account.
On July 11, Mr. Tenet said agency officials raised "several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence" with White House officials. "Some of the language was changed," Mr. Tenet said.
Other intelligence officials have recounted a back-and-forth between Mr. Joseph and Alan Foley, a C.I.A. expert on banned weapons, in which Mr. Foley recommended making no reference to uranium purchases.
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19-07-2003 10:40
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