SOTU URANIUM CLAIM EXPOSED BY BUSH ADVISORY BOARD

[papau]

THE DAILY MIS-LEAD
< http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1338421&l=13568 >

SOTU URANIUM CLAIM EXPOSED BY BUSH ADVISORY BOARD

The now famous uranium claim made by President Bush in last year's State of the Union address has been found to be questionable, 11 months later, by the president's own advisory board.

The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, headed by President George H.W. Bush's national security adviser, Admiral Brent Scowcroft, shared its findings with the president seven months after being asked to look into the matter. The advisory board found that while there was no "deliberate effort" to deceive, the report faulted the White House for being anxious to "grab onto something affirmative."

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed in June that "No one knew at the time, in our circles--maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery." But Bush's own CIA Director, George Tenet, had intervened in October 2002 to have a reference to Iraq's alleged purchase of uranium removed from a Bush speech. Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, who took responsibility himself for allowing the inclusion of the yellowcake reference, denied that the Bush administration cherry-picked intelligence, saying, "I don't accept that that happened."

Even after conceding that the documents were false in July, presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "We see nothing that would dissuade us from the President's broader statement," meaning that the White House still stood by their assertions that yellowcake from Niger was sought by Iraq. Claims that the Niger documents represented "only one piece of evidence in a larger body of evidence," have yet to verified with further documentation.<snip>

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