Truthout: Tenet Book Blames White House for "16 Words"

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042907A.shtml

Tenet Book Blames White House for "16 Words"
By Jason Leopold and Matt Renner
t r u t h o u t | Report

Sunday 29 April 2007

Ex-CIA chief says he was "in bed, asleep" during Bush' 2003 State of the Union speech when the president claimed Iraq was attempting to obtain uranium from Niger.

George Tenet told former Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley in October 2002 that allegations about Iraq's attempt to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger should immediately be removed from a speech President Bush was to give in Cincinnati. Tenet told Hadley that the intelligence was unreliable.

"Steve, take it out," the ex-CIA director writes in a new book, "At the Center of the Storm," about a conversation he had with Hadley on October 5, 2002, about the 16 words that alleged Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Niger. As deputy National Security Adviser, Hadley was also in charge of the clearance process for speeches given by White House officials. "The facts, I told him, were too much in doubt."

The 16 words in question, "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," was cited by Bush in a January 28, 2003 State of the Union address and was widely seen as the single most important element that helped convince Congress and the public to back an invasion of Iraq. However, the intelligence was wholly unreliable and based on forged documents. Tenet says that White House officials knew that and used the language anyway.

Following his conversation with Hadley, one of Tenet's aides sent a follow-up letter to then Deputy National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Hadley, and Bush's speechwriter Mike Gerson highlighting additional reasons the language about Iraq's purported attempts to obtain uranium from the African country of Niger should not be used to try and convince Congress and the public that Iraq was an imminent threat, Tenet wrote in the book.

"More on why we recommend removing the sentence about procuring uranium oxide from Africa," Tenet wrote in the book, apparently quoting from a memo sent to the White House. "Three points: (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of French authorities; (2) the procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions...And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them the Africa story is overblown and telling them this was one of two issues where we differed with the British."

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