Press Trust of India Posted online: Tuesday, July 08, 2003 at 1942 hours IST
Washington, July 8: The US administration has admitted for the first time that President George W Bush was wrong about one of the main reasons he gave for the Iraq war- that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium for its nuclear weapon programme from Niger.
The White House admission that President Bush should not have made the allegation in his State of Union address came on Monday night, soon after publication of the British Parliamentary Commission report which raised serious questions about the reliability of British intelligence that was cited by Bush to convince American people that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were a threat to US security.
"Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa" (included in President Bush's State of the Union message and repeated by Secretary of State Colin Powell in the UN Security Council) "should not have been included in the State of the Union speech", a senior Bush administration official said.
Bush in his address in January had said that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa".
The senior administration official said that a classified version of a US national intelligence estimate on Iraq's weapons programme, completed last September, contained references to intelligence reports that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium not only from Niger but also two other African countries--Namibia and Gabon, Washington Post reported.
However, they were not included in the State of the Union speech becaue reports about Namibia and Gabon could not be confirmed and some government analysts did not consider the information reliable.
