National News CIA did not receive disputed documents until after Bush claim

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WASHINGTON (AP) - CIA Director George Tenet reaffirmed his responsibility for the CIA's approval of an unsubstantiated claim in a speech by President George W. Bush that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa.

Tenet's latest statement came in a closed-door hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on July 16 after he publicly accepted responsibility July 11 for the claim in Bush's State of the Union address in January.

At the time of the speech, the CIA had not yet obtained the documents that served as a key foundation for the allegation and later turned out to be forged, officials say.

The CIA didn't receive the documents until February 2003, nearly a year after the agency first began investigating the alleged Iraq-Africa connection and a short time after it assented to language in Bush's speech that alleged such a connection, the officials said.

Without the source documents, the CIA could investigate only their substance, which it learned from a foreign government in 2002. One of the key allegations was that Iraq was soliciting uranium from the African country of Niger.

Even as the CIA found little to verify the reports, Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to put them into public statements.

The discredited documents at the center of the controversy are a series of letters between officials in Iraq and Niger. The letters, which were proved to be forgeries by the U.N. nuclear watchdog, indicated Niger would supply uranium to Iraq in a form that could be refined for nuclear weapons.

The CIA declined to say how the agency eventually obtained the documents, although some sources have said that they were passed on by the Italian government.

In recent weeks, the Bush administration has offered a number of defenses for using the statement, including: the CIA should have had it removed; it was based on more intelligence information than the Niger letter; it was technically true because it was attributed to British intelligence; and it wasn't the reason the United States invaded Iraq.

米CIAのイラク情報ねつ造問題

CIA長官はそれが虚偽の情報に基づくものだったことを認めた。これを受け、16日には米上院でテネット長官に対する喚問が行なわれた。

Shukan ST: July 25, 2003

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