DETAIL WORK

White House Tells How Bush Came to Talk of Iraq Uranium (RICHARD W. STEVENSON, July 19, 2003, NY Times)

The White House today set out its most detailed explanation yet of how disputed intelligence about Iraq's weapons program made it into President Bush's State of the Union address, contradicting a crucial element of the version of events provided by the Central Intelligence Agency.

In a briefing for reporters, a senior administration official said the White House had changed an initial draft of the speech to make it more credible by attributing the assertion that Iraq had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa to a public British intelligence dossier.

The official said the change had been made after internal White House deliberations about the best way to present the information and not, as intelligence officials have said, in response to concerns raised by the C.I.A. about the credibility of intelligence reports that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium in Niger.

As part of today's briefing, the White House declassified part of its main prewar intelligence summary on Iraq's weapons programs. The document, a National Intelligence Estimate, encompasses the findings of the main intelligence agencies. The document noted reports that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in Africa but included a warning from the State Department that the reports were "highly dubious."

White House officials said the document was one of those drawn on by speechwriters as they put together the State of the Union address. The official who gave the briefing today said Mr. Bush was unaware of the State Department's skepticism.

The president "is not a fact checker," the official said.

The document also noted that the intelligence agencies had "low confidence" in some of its conclusions, including when Saddam Hussein might use weapons of mass destruction, whether he would try to attack the United States and whether he would provide chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda. Administration officials had cited all those possibilities in building a case for the war.

The point being that there were ten or twenty distinct reasons offered for the war, with the fact that Saddam was defying the conditions of the cease-fire that ended the first phase of the fighting, in 1991, being sufficient unto itself. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 19, 2003 6:20 AM