W. House 'Grab' Was WMD Flub

An advisory panel has found that the White House was desperately searching for evidence of Iraqi nuclear transgressions when it included a discredited claim in last year's State of the Union address, a newspaper reports.

The Washington Post reports that a source familiar with the findings of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board says the panel has concluded the White House made "no deliberate effort to fabricate" the claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa.

Instead, the claim was written into the president's speech as part of an effort "to grab onto something affirmative" about Saddam Hussein's alleged nuclear program.

The panel was chaired by Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush. Its findings will not be made public.

In his State of the Union, President Bush said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

That was only one of several occasions that same month where the administration made a similar claim. The Post reports the claim was repeated on at least six occasions around the time of the State of the Union speech.

Shortly after Mr. Bush's speech, the U.S. turned over to the International Atomic Energy Agency documents purporting to prove an Iraqi bid for uranium to Niger. Within days, the IAEA reported the papers were forgeries.

Then in June, a former U.S. ambassador, Joseph Wilson, came forward to say that at the behest of the CIA he had personally investigated the claim in early 2002 and found no evidence to substantiate it. Niger was the African country involved.

It later emerged that another envoy had also probed the charge, and reached conclusions similar to Wilson. The Justice Department is now investigating who named Wilson's wife, a CIA agent, to the media for stories related to Wilson's revelation.

The White House retracted the Africa claim soon after Wilson came forward, but it was unclear how the allegation made it into the State of the Union speech, normally the president's biggest speech of the year and the subject of months of preparation.

The CIA, doubting the Africa link, tried to get British intelligence to omit the claim from its September 2002 dossier on Iraq's suspected weapons programs. The British went ahead with the claim anyway, and it became the basis for the president's speech.

The White House first insisted it was unaware before the Jan. 28 speech that there were problems with the intelligence underlying the claim.

But Stephen Hadley, No. 2 on the president's national security team, disclosed Tuesday that two CIA memos and a call from CIA Director George Tenet had persuaded him to take a similar passage out of a presidential speech in October — and that he should have done likewise when it turned up again in State of the Union drafts.

Hadley said he had forgotten about those objections by the time the State of the Union speech was being crafted.

In its National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, the CIA in October 2002 did report that "a foreign government service" reported efforts by Iraq to obtain uranium from Niger. There were also reports pertaining to Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The uranium claim has become the best known of the Bush administration's allegations against Iraq, which included charges that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons, was working toward nuclear arms, and had active links to terrorist groups like al Qaeda.

United Nations inspectors doubted that Iraq had any weapons, but the U.S. said Saddam was duping the U.N. teams — as he had done in the early 1990s — and invaded Iraq in March.

No weapons have been found despite an intense hunt by the Iraq Survey Group since June, leading the Bush administration to focus on the possibility that Iraq maintained weapons programs, if not actual stockpiles.

In October, survey group leader David Kay reported evidence of possible biological weapons and illegal missile programs, and intentions by Iraq to resume chemical and nuclear weapons work. But critics noted Kay reported no weapons and no solid evidence of actual weapons programs.

The Post reported recently that Kay is planning to leave the survey group for personal reasons.

Some U.S. analysts have claimed in published reports that they felt pressure to skew intelligence to fit the Bush administration's case. Declassified documents have indicated significant doubt and disagreement within the intelligence community over the threat posed by Iraq.

Several theories have emerged to explain the gap between intelligence and what Iraq possessed. Defectors who provided some of the weapons claims may have lied or unwittingly provided false information sent out by Iraqi intelligence as a smokescreen.

It is also possible, some analysts say, that Saddam's scientists lied to him, leading him to believe Iraq did possess illegal weapons when none existed.