July 12, 2003	Saturday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 11, 1424

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ENTEBBE (Uganda), July 11: US President George Bush on Friday refused to take the blame for using flawed data on Iraq’s nuclear programme in his State of the Union speech, saying the Central Intelligence Agency cleared it before it was delivered.

Questions over the drama sparked by claims that Iraq sought uranium in Africa, again pursued Mr Bush on his tour of the continent, as he jetted into Uganda for a four-hour stay devoted to the battle against AIDS.

As aides struggled to contain a growing political storm, Bush said the CIA cleared the speech delivered to Congress in late January as the administration laid down the rationale for war to disarm Saddam Hussein.

“I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by intelligence services. It was a speech that detailed to the American people the dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime,” President Bush said.

“My government took the appropriate response to the dangers, and as a result the world is more secure and more peaceful,” Mr Bush said after talks with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

As a reporter tried to ask Mr Bush a follow-up question, Museveni hurriedly waved the press away.

The US charge against Iraq stemmed from forged documents alleging that the former Baghdad regime had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger, and from separate information that Saddam also sought the radioactive material from other African nations.

Bush’s national Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told reporters that the address was sent to CIA Director George Tenet for approval.

“Now 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,” she told reporters on Air Force One.

Senior administration officials said that before Rice spoke with the press, she phoned Tenet in Washington.

In an apparent bid to contain the damage to the administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell on Thursday firmly denied that President Bush had deceived Americans during the speech.

Speaking in Pretoria, he called the drama over the flawed data “overdrawn, overblown, overwrought,” and denied that the administration was guilty of “cooking the books” by hyping intelligence to justify the war.

Colin Powell admitted, however, that by the time he gave a key presentation to the UN Security Council only a week after Bush’s address, the Africa uranium connection was regarded as unreliable.

In revelations further fanning the crisis, the Washington Post reported on Friday that the CIA believed as far back as last September that there were problems with the claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa.

The paper said the CIA had tried to persuade the British government drop the claim from an official intelligence paper.

“We consulted about the paper and recommended against using that material,” the newspaper quoted a senior administration official familiar with the intelligence programme as saying.

But the British government rejected the US suggestion, saying it had separate intelligence unavailable to the United States, according to the report.

The Post said that at that time, the CIA was completing its own classified national intelligence estimate on Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes.

Although the CIA report mentioned alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from three African countries, it warned that State Department analysts were questioning its accuracy when it came to Niger and that CIA personnel considered reports on other African countries to be “sketchy,” the paper said.—AFP