WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush's claim in his State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa was "highly misleading" and "not an inadvertent mistake," the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said Saturday.
"The sole purpose of that statement was to make the American people believe that our government believed it. But the truth was that our intelligence agencies did not believe it," said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan in the Democrats' Saturday radio address.
"This uranium issue is not just about 16 words in a speech. It is about whether administration officials made a conscious and very troubling decision to create a false impression about the gravity and imminence of the threat that Iraq posed to America."
Levin also said the controversy could prove damaging to both U.S. national security and leadership because it calls American credibility into question.
"Unless we address the objectivity and reliability of U.S. intelligence before the Iraq war, our government's warnings about future security threats will be greeted with skepticism," he said.
In his State of the Union speech, Bush said the Iraqi regime was seeking to buy uranium in Africa, attributing the information to British intelligence.
The White House now concedes that the claim should not have been included in the speech because U.S. intelligence could not verify it. CIA Director George Tenet has taken responsibility for not having it removed.
However, British officials continue to insist that the information is accurate, while Bush administration officials insist it was only a small part of a larger case for taking out Saddam Hussein.
But Levin said the decision to include the uranium charge in the speech was "not an inadvertent mistake."
"It was negotiated between CIA and National Security Council officials, and it was highly misleading," he said. "Even more troubling is evidence that the uranium statement was just one of many questionable statements and exaggerations by the intelligence community and administration officials in the buildup to the war."
Among those questionable statements, according to Levin: Assertions by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that there was no doubt Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and claims by administration officials of a close connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
Levin said the question of whether pre-war intelligence was faulty or abused "must be thoroughly investigated" to re-establish U.S. credibility.
CNN.com | July 19, 2003
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