"The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa," the New York Times reports. Monday evening after Bush had departed for Africa, White House officials issued
a statement in spokesman Ari Fleischer's name that "made clear that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush's statement" made in January's State of the Union address. As of yet, no one has taken responsibility for including in the speech the false claim about Iraq's attempt to acquire enriched uranium from Niger.
The acknowledgment came after weeks of questions and contradictory answers in the US and UK about intelligence used by the Bush and Blair administrations to justify an invasion of Iraq. In our new book, Weapons of Mass Deception [3], we expose the Bush administration's hard sell for a war on Iraq -- an international pitch based on distortions, lies, and misinformation.