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CIA Chief Reportedly Deleted Iraq-Africa Connection From a Bush Speech
VOA News
13 Jul 2003, 14:29 UTC

Senior Bush administration officials say the CIA intervened to delete a reference to Iraq seeking to buy uranium from Niger from a presidential speech last October.

The Washington Post Sunday quoted the officials as saying CIA Director George Tenet persuaded the White House to omit the information because it came from only a single source.

It quotes another senior official as saying the CIA had doubts about the accuracy of the information that was later determined to have come from forged documents.

The incident came three months before the January State of the Union address, which included a less specific reference, attributed to British intelligence, of the alleged Iraq-Niger connection.

The New York Times on Sunday quoted unidentified senior administration officials as saying Mr. Tenet did not see that section of the State of the Union address before it was delivered by President Bush.

The White House has since said the information should not have been in the speech and Mr. Tenet has taken responsibility for the mistake.

Sunday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defended the CIA director and the statement about Niger.

He pointed out that Britain still stands behind the allegation and said no one has yet proven it to be inaccurate. But he said the reference should not have been in the State of the Union address.

Also Sunday, the former head of United Nations weapons inspectors, Hans Blix, said the British government made a fundamental mistake when it claimed Iraq could deploy biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear weapons within 45 minutes.

The claim was contained in the government's September dossier on nuclear weapons. Mr. Blix told London's Sunday Independent newspaper that the claim was, quoting, pretty far off the mark.

The threat posed by Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction was one of the major reasons cited by both the United States and Britain to justify the war in Iraq.

So far, no such weapons have been found.