U.S. Officials Downplay ‘Mistake’ in Bush’s Speech

Top White House officials on Sunday described a subsequently discredited statement by President Bush about Baghdad’s nuclear program as a minor “mistake” that should not undermine the administration’s credibility or cast broader doubt on its case for war.

National security advisor Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended the decision to unseat Saddam Hussein, arguing that the statement in Bush’s State of the Union address, alleging that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa, was a tiny piece of the rationale for war.

In several television appearances, Rice repeatedly described the suspect claim as just “16 words” in a presidential speech that emphasized a long list of compelling evidence.

In a part of the speech concerning Iraq’s quest for a nuclear weapons program, Bush said: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

The White House withdrew that claim last week, acknowledging that the underlying intelligence -- including documents later shown to be forgeries -- was flawed.

The concession triggered an intense round of finger-pointing that ultimately forced CIA Director George J. Tenet to accept partial blame for the inclusion of the language.

The president “did not go to war because of the question of whether or not Saddam Hussein sought the uranium in Africa,” Rice said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” Rather, she said it was “because this was a bloody tyrant, who for 12 years had defied the international community,” amassed weapons and destabilized the Middle East.

A number of leading lawmakers and even some officials in the administration and intelligence agencies have questioned whether the uranium claim was symptomatic of a broader attempt to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

With polls indicating that a growing number of Americans believe the administration may have engaged in hype, Rice and Rumsfeld argued that the uranium claim was an isolated and innocent slip.

“There was a mistake here,” Rice said on CNN. “Something went wrong, and we will all go back and redouble our efforts to see that something like this doesn’t happen again.”

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rumsfeld said it was clear that “in retrospect, the president would not have said it, and I would not have said it. But the idea that that has any central role in the intelligence community’s assessment of what was going on in Iraq would be a misunderstanding.”

Their appearances were part of a coordinated effort by the White House to contain the damage on the failure to find evidence of banned weapons in Iraq, an issue that threatens to dog President Bush into next year’s presidential elections.

Democrats, particularly those seeking the presidential nomination, have become increasingly assertive in their criticism of the administration’s case for war, as well as its conduct of the volatile postwar situation in Iraq.

Several key Democrats said Sunday that they hold the White House, not the CIA, responsible.

“Making [Tenet] the fall guy does not resolve the question or make go away the questions about the overall intelligence, and why the administration clearly had this political tug-of-war over the kind of information they were presenting America,” presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said on CNN.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called Sunday for a congressional investigation to probe “very disturbing evidence” of “exaggerated” intelligence.

“Someone in the White House was pushing the CIA,” Levin said on CNN. “The CIA finally concurred. They shouldn’t have. But the White House should not have been pushing to create a misleading statement.”

In a statement released Friday, Tenet admitted the CIA should have stripped the uranium claim from Bush’s speech. But he made it clear that the agency had raised objections to its inclusion, and allowed it to stand only because the claim was attributed to the British government.

Tenet is expected to face questions on the subject when he testifies before a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

The British still stand behind the claim, and Rice said it may yet prove true. She denied on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that there had been any “insistence” by the White House to use the language but repeatedly sidestepped questions about who was responsible for its insertion.

Rice would say only that the National Security Council and other offices in the White House had gathered a wide range of intelligence on Iraq and presented it to speechwriters. “A text is created,” and it is the CIA’s job to vet it, she said.

She also tried to tamp down the significance of reports in the Los Angeles Times and other papers Sunday that Tenet had successfully intervened in October -- months before the State of the Union, which was given in January -- to get the White House to remove similar language from a speech the president gave in Cincinnati.

Rice argued on “Fox News Sunday” that the reference in the Cincinnati speech focused solely on a single piece of intelligence that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. The State of the Union address referred to broader attempts to procure uranium from three African nations and was based on multiple pieces of intelligence, including a British dossier and a classified U.S. assessment.

That would suggest that the White House believed it was appropriate to include the reference in the later speech because the amount of intelligence available on the subject had grown. But a U.S. official said Sunday that both the British dossier and the classified U.S. assessment had been released even before the Cincinnati speech.

Rice defended other pieces of the administration’s case for war that have also come under question, saying there were “reports from multiple sources” that Hussein was distributing chemical weapons to units of his military. No evidence of such weapons has been found.

Asked on “Fox News Sunday” whether she believes the United States will find banned weapons in Iraq, she replied: “I believe that we will find the truth, and I believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”