## Bush Declares His Faith in Tenet and C.I.A.

### By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
July 13, 2003

> ABUJA, Nigeria, July 12 - A day after the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, took responsibility for the use of unsubstantiated information about Iraq's nuclear program in the State of the Union address, President Bush said today that he retained confidence in Mr. Tenet and that he considered the matter closed.

> Speaking to reporters here at the conclusion of a five-nation tour of Africa, Mr. Bush said he "absolutely" had faith in Mr. Tenet and in the C.I.A. generally. Mr. Bush's comments followed a strikingly open effort by the White House on Friday to place the blame on Mr. Tenet for not stripping from the State of the Union speech a line, based on unreliable intelligence, asserting that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium in Africa for a nuclear weapons program.

> In response to a question from a reporter about whether he had confidence in his C.I.A. director, Mr. Bush said: "Yes, I do. Absolutely. I've got confidence in George Tenet and in the men and women who work at the C.I.A."

> The matter has set off a political storm, with some Democrats seizing on it as evidence that the president might have exaggerated the threat from Iraq in advance of the war. Members of both parties have raised questions about the C.I.A.'s handling of the intelligence and its vetting of Mr. Bush's speech.

> Senior administration officials familiar with the writing of the speech said today that Mr. Tenet never read the draft section that dealt with the uranium before Mr. Bush delivered it in late January. However, the officials said, Mr. Tenet personally spoke with Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, in early October to warn against having Mr. Bush declare, in a speech about the Iraqi threat, that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy 550 tons of uranium ore in the African nation of Niger. The reference was omitted when Mr. Bush gave the speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7.

> Administration officials had previously said that the White House was warned by the C.I.A. against mentioning the uranium issue in the Cincinnati speech. But they never before said that Mr. Tenet was a central player in that process.

> His involvement indicates that both he and White House officials were aware of the doubts about the intelligence three months before the State of the Union speech.

> With the issue threatening to undermine Mr. Bush's support at a time when American soldiers continue to be killed in Iraq and the Democratic presidential candidates are becoming more assertive in challenging the president on foreign policy, the White House clearly was seeking to put the matter to rest.

> "The president is pleased that the director of central intelligence acknowledged what needed to be acknowledged," said Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman. "The president has moved on. And I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on as well."

> The dispute stems from a single sentence in the State of the Union address, based on what officials have said were a number of sources and a British public statement about Iraq's efforts to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. After C.I.A. officials raised concerns about the wording in an early draft of the speech, the White House changed it to make it vaguer and to attribute it to Britain. The C.I.A. subsequently signed off on the speech.

> "The British government," the president said in the address on Jan. 28, "has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

> In a statement issued late Friday, Mr. Tenet did not say that he had personally cleared the speech, but that he was "responsible for the approval process in my agency." Mr. Tenet, who was appointed to his post by President Clinton and has been part of Mr. Bush's inner circle in fighting terrorism, added: "The president had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president."

> Mr. Fleischer, asked today whether the White House had asked Mr. Tenet to issue his statement, said the decision was mutual. "Discussions with Director Tenet about the statement have been going on for days," Mr. Fleischer said. "The discussion was, the C.I.A. needs to explain what its role was in this."

> But Mr. Fleischer continued to face questions from reporters today about why the White House had not retracted Mr. Bush's statement in the State of the Union address sooner, especially since Secretary of State Colin L. Powell chose not to use the intelligence in the presentation he made to the United Nations in February, a week after the State of the Union speech and six weeks before the start of the war. Mr. Powell has said he did not consider the information reliable enough.

> Participants in the process note that Mr. Tenet reviewed the same material with Mr. Powell as they prepared the presentation to the United Nations. The two men decided together that the story of Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium in Africa - specifically in Niger, Somalia and Congo - could not be supported.

> Mr. Fleischer said the White House had corrected the president's statement in March, when the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that documents that had provided much of the basis for the claim about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium were forged. But White House officials had said throughout the spring that there was other evidence to back up the claim.

> Mr. Tenet would seem to be in a tenuous political position: he was one of the few Democrats held over by Mr. Bush. But in his daily morning intelligence briefings with the president, the two men appear to have formed a bond, aides say. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, defended Mr. Tenet on Friday even as she laid blame at his door. "The C.I.A. director, George Tenet, has been a terrific D.C.I. and he has served everybody very, very well," she said, using initials for "director of central intelligence."

> Even today, the administration continued to suggest that the information about Iraq's activities in Africa might ultimately be proved correct. "What we have said is it should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech," Mr. Fleischer said. "People cannot conclude that the information was necessarily false."

> According to administration officials who are reconstructing the drafts of the speech, in the days before Mr. Bush delivered it White House officials sought details that they could insert to give the charge credibility - including describing specific amounts of uranium ore that Iraq allegedly sought to buy. They were dissuaded by Alan Foley, a proliferation expert at the C.I.A. Mr. Foley, administration officials said, told Robert G. Joseph, his counterpart at the National Security Council, that there were too many uncertainties to make a statement that specified where or how much uranium Iraq might have been seeking.

> The claim in the State of the Union speech about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium were drawn from a catalog of intelligence information known as the National Intelligence Estimate. It is overseen by Mr. Tenet and is a synthesis of work done by all the United States intelligence services.

> In this case, a classified version of the document included an allegation that Iraq had been trying to acquire uranium in Niger. A footnote elsewhere in the document said the State Department's intelligence arm had doubts about whether the claim was justified by the evidence. Somalia and Congo were also cited as places where Iraq might be seeking uranium.

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