Okay -- the CIA is beginning to square off against the White House on the 16 words flap. Good!
White House Releases Documents on Iraq Flap
By Ken Fireman and Knut Royce
Washington Bureau
July 19, 2003
Washington -- Seeking to blunt charges that it used flawed intelligence to buttress its case for war in Iraq, the White House Friday released an account of how a now-discredited assertion found its way into President George W. Bush's State of the Union speech that differed sharply from one given by the CIA.
It also released portions of a classified 2002 CIA "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraqi weapons programs that concluded Saddam Hussein was trying to revive his nuclear weapons program -- but included a sharp dissent from the State Department.
In a briefing for reporters, a senior administration official also ruled out any testimony by White House staffers at hearings being held by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The panel is attempting to determine how Bush came to assert in January that Iraq was seeking enriched uranium in Africa even though the CIA had raised serious questions about the claim months earlier and had gotten it deleted from a Bush speech in October. The White House acknowledged last week that the assertion should not have been included in the January address; documents purporting to detail an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium in the West African country of Niger were exposed in March as forgeries.
The senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, offered the most detailed account yet of how the African uranium claim made it into the January speech. The official contradicted Democratic charges that the White House had pressed to include the claim over CIA opposition and denied that the speech was rewritten to meet CIA complaints that an earlier draft was inaccurate.
The official said Bush speechwriters looking for concrete examples of Hussein's illicit weapons programs had latched onto the uranium claim because it was contained in the classified National Intelligence Estimate, as well as a public British document.
The official said the speechwriters initially had drafted a series of accusations about Iraqi weapons programs, including the African uranium charge, in the form of flat assertions. They later decided for stylistic reasons to attribute each accusation to a specific source; in the case of the uranium charge, they decided to attribute it to the British document because it was a public document, the official said. At no point did the draft ever include a reference to a specific African country, according to the official.
The proposed change was passed by Robert Joseph, an official with the White House National Security Council, to a CIA proliferations expert, Alan Foley, for review, the administration official said. Foley approved the change without any "protracted negotiation" or "a sharing of various language," said the official, who said his statement was based on Joseph's recollection of the conversation.
But Foley offered a sharply different account when he testified at a closed-door session of the Senate panel on Wednesday, according to a senior intelligence official familiar with the testimony.
Foley's recollection is that an early draft of the speech contained a reference to Niger and a specific amount of uranium that Iraq was supposedly seeking there, according to the intelligence official.
Foley expressed disquiet over that language because it might compromise intelligence-gathering methods as well as doubts about its reliability, the official said. Joseph suggested attributing the charge to the British; Foley reminded him that the CIA had urged the British not to include the accusation in their own intelligence document, but eventually signed off on the language with some reluctance, according to the intelligence official.
Told that the White House was saying Joseph and Foley discussed only attribution and not the credibility of the uranium charge, the official said: "That may be Mr. Joseph's recollection; it's not Mr. Foley's."
The excerpt of the National Intelligence Estimate released Friday concluded that Hussein's regime possessed illicit chemical and biological weapons and missiles and "if left unchecked ... will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade."
It said that "in the view of most" U.S. intelligence agencies Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear program and cited attempts to obtain aluminum tubes for centrifuges, magnets, high-speed balancing machines and machine tools. The issue of African uranium was not cited as a key finding, but was mentioned later in the report with no judgment offered as to its veracity.
The estimate included a sharp dissent from the State Department's intelligence arm, which said it was unconvinced Iraq was pursuing "a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program." It questioned whether the equipment cited in the estimate was suitable for nuclear uses and called the claim of African uranium purchases "highly dubious."
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