July 15, 2003	Tuesday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 14, 1424

WASHINGTON: Two top senior Bush administration officials on Sunday defended the president’s use of British intelligence about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa in his State of the Union address and said it might yet turn out to be true.

Appearing on Sunday television shows, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, both confirmed that the CIA had voiced its doubts about the allegation that was included in a September 2002 British dossier published on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes.

But they said the British had sources beyond those of the US intelligence agency and that London continued to stand by its story.

On Friday, CIA Director George Tenet took responsibility for not seeking removal from the president’s January address the 16- word sentence: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Tenet’s statement came just hours after Bush had appeared to blame the CIA which the president said had cleared his remarks.

Rumsfeld appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, said it was “technically correct, what the president said, that the (British government) did say that and still says that.” But the defence secretary added, Bush and Tenet now believe “referencing another country’s intelligence as opposed to your own” was probably the wrong thing to do in a speech as important as the State of the Union.

Rice and Rumsfeld described the political storm the statement caused in Washington as overblown.

“End of story,” Rumsfeld said on ABC’s This Week.

Rice said on CBS’s Face the Nation that “it was a mistake about a single sentence, a single data point. And I frankly think it has been overblown.” She described as “ludicrous” the “notion that the president of the United States took the country to war because he was concerned with one sentence about whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa.”

She said with regard to Iraq’s nuclear programme there was “a long story about acquisition programmes, about illegal procurement programmes, about keeping scientists together.”

Beyond that, she said, “The president took the nation to war to depose a bloody tyrant who had defied the world for 12 years, who was building a weapons of mass destruction programme.”

Rice went on to say that the British had other documents and sources beyond those also possessed by US intelligence that have since been found to have been forged. But Rice confirmed an earlier story in The Washington Post that the British have not shared either the intelligence underlying their statement nor its source.

“The British have reasons because of the arrangements that they made ... that they cannot share them with us,” Rice said on Fox News on Sunday.

Rice also confirmed that a reference to Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger was removed from Bush’s October 2002 speech in Cincinnati on Saddam’s threat to the United States after Tenet personally intervened.

“There it was a single report of a particular transaction ... and there were questions about that,” she said on CNN’s Late Edition.

Rice and Rumsfeld said they eventually expected weapons or evidence of those programmes would be found.

Rumsfeld, on This Week, said the new Iraq Survey Group, directed by David Kay, a former UN weapons inspector who is now working for Tenet, is interrogating people rather than going from one suspected site to another. “We have to be patient,” Rumsfeld said. “There isn’t anyone who’s looked at all the intelligence that I know of who doesn’t believe that the intelligence community was correct.”

Sen. Richard C. Shelby, R-Ala., a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a longtime critic of Tenet agreed there was “not enough substance to back up” the president’s sentence.

He said most of the blame should go to Tenet because a strong CIA director should have said, “Stop that. Don’t say that.”

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who has been critical of the administration’s handling of Iraq intelligence leading up to the war, said the sentence attributed to the British was “highly misleading” and was “intended to create a false impression.”—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.