Merit Seen in Claims That Iraq Sought Uranium
WASHINGTON — In reports released during the last week, U.S. and British panels sharply criticized their two governments for making ill-founded claims about Iraq's efforts to build weapons of mass destruction -- claims that were the central rationale for the U.S.-led invasion of the country in March 2003.
But on at least one hotly debated issue -- Iraq's purported interest in buying uranium from the West African nation of Niger -- the two governments may have been on stronger footing than generally believed, both investigations found.
In a report issued Wednesday, the British commission of inquiry, headed by Lord Robin Butler, a retired civil service chief, found that Saddam Hussein's government had no usable stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, contrary to assertions by President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
But on the issue of Hussein's interest in nuclear weapons, the commission said, "The British government had intelligence from several different sources" indicating that Iraqi officials sought to buy uranium from Niger in 1999.
"The intelligence was credible," the report says.
Last week, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence excoriated U.S. intelligence agencies for assessments of Iraq's weapons programs that "either overstated or were not supported by" the evidence. But on the question of whether Iraq had sought uranium from Africa for nuclear weapons, the committee found that the CIA's statement, in a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, "was reasonable" at the time. The committee added, however, that the evidence behind the assertion turned out to be weak, and charged that the CIA failed to make that clear to policymakers.
The issue has been a point of unusual contention for two reasons: Bush mentioned Iraq's alleged uranium-buying effort in his State of the Union speech in January 2003, as he was urging the nation to war, only to acknowledge later that the assertion was not backed by conclusive evidence.
And the controversy led to a criminal investigation after an administration official leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a newspaper columnist in an apparent attempt to discredit the operative's husband, a prominent critic of the administration.
In the State of the Union address, Bush said that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
