Bush Backs U.S. Intelligence as Questions Persist

President Bush on Monday defended the quality of U.S. intelligence as “darn good,” despite the inclusion in his State of the Union address of unsubstantiated allegations that Saddam Hussein’s regime tried to buy uranium in Africa.

Bush also suggested that the furor over his assertion that Iraq sought to acquire such material in Africa obscures the “larger point”-- that Hussein “absolutely” possessed a weapons of mass destruction program.

“And I am absolutely convinced today, like I was convinced when I gave the [prewar] speeches, that Saddam Hussein developed a program of weapons of mass destruction and that our country made the right decision,” the president told reporters at the White House.

At issue is the reliability of Bush’s statement in his nationally televised speech before a joint session of Congress in January that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

That passage has become a lightning rod for criticism of how the Bush administration built the case for going to war, and both Democrats and the media continued to hammer on the White House Monday for a full accounting -- despite a White House declaration last week that Bush considered the matter closed.

One of the administration’s sharpest critics, Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), said in a statement: “These officials should be reminded that what is at stake is not just the credibility of one man or even the credibility of the office of the president of the United States. What we place in the balance is the credibility of the United States as a nation and as leader of the free world.”

Bush is said to be angry that questionable information made its way into such a major address.

“I assure you, the president is not pleased,” White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said. “The president, of course, would not be pleased if he said something in the State of the Union that may or may not have been true and should not have risen to his level.” Steps have been taken to avoid a recurrence, Fleischer said.

“I think it’s safe to say that everybody involved in the vetting process already knows that this process has to be improved,” he said. “Nobody wants to go through this once more, of course. A State of the Union is one of the most important speeches a president can give. And I think everybody involved has learned the lessons from this.”

A week ago, the White House acknowledged that the evidence supporting the statement did not meet the standards of a presidential address to the nation.

However, Fleischer maintained Monday that the statement “very well may be true. We don’t know if it’s true, but nobody can say it is wrong.”

The president and CIA Director George J. Tenet have said the CIA approved the 16 words on Iraq and Africa.

But a written mea culpa issued Friday by Tenet, in which he accepted responsibility for failing to excise the sentence from the speech, has hardly put the issue to rest, as the president discovered Monday during a photo session with visiting U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Bush sounded defensive as he fielded questions about the controversy.

“When I gave the speech, the line was relevant,” he said, noting that it had been cleared by the CIA. The president said it was only after his January speech that the agency “had some doubts” about the reliability of the information.

“The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is absolutely,” Bush said.

He spoke briefly to reporters in the Oval Office after meeting with Annan. They discussed such issues as Iraq, the Middle East peace process and the status of peacekeeping efforts in Liberia.

In his final White House briefing for the media, Fleischer echoed the president as reporters peppered him with questions. Fleischer dismissed the question of whether Hussein had sought uranium in Africa as a “minor element” in the array of factors Bush weighed before undertaking a “regime change” in Baghdad.

“They were seeking to reconstitute their nuclear program, whether they got the uranium from Africa or from somewhere else,” he said.

“The fact of the matter is, whether they sought it from Africa or didn’t seek it from Africa doesn’t change the fact that they were seeking to reconstitute a nuclear program.

“The fact that they had biological weapons made them a threat. The fact that they had chemical weapons made them a threat. And that’s why this president did the right thing and led our nation to war to remove the threat,” Fleischer said.

The spokesman declined to specify what new safeguards have been instituted in fact-checking presidential speeches in light of the controversy, saying only that “people are going to make certain that they do their due diligence with each and every sentence of every presidential address.”

The White House’s continuing statements and explanations on Monday did not satisfy Democrats, who raised more questions about the administration’s handling of the matter. And antiwar advocacy groups launched a television advertising campaign accusing Bush of misleading Americans about Iraq’s nuclear ambitions. The ad ends with the word “Leader” superimposed on the president’s face; the word then changes to “Misleader.”