Bush accuses Saddam Hussein of seeking to acquire African uranium, Jan. 28, 2003

On this day in 2003, President George W. Bush, in delivering his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, said: “The British government has learned that [Iraqi dictator] Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

A high-ranking Bush administration official subsequently said that evidence in support of this claim was inconclusive at best and added: “These 16 words should never have been included [in his speech].” The official attributed the error to the CIA.


In mid-2003, the U.S. government declassified the 2002 national intelligence estimate, which contained a dissenting opinion from the State Department, asserting that the intelligence connecting African uranium from Niger to Iraq was “highly suspect.” The department’s intelligence analysts did not believe that Niger would be likely to engage in such a transaction because a French consortium maintained close control over Niger's uranium industry.

A year before the Bush speech to Congress, French intelligence officials had told their U.S. counterparts that the allegation could not be supported with hard evidence.

After the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, when U.S. troops could find no signs of a current nuclear weapons program, the allegation and how it came to be included in the speech became a focus for critics. Some of them charged that the White House manipulated intelligence information to bolster Bush’s resolve to launch what turned out to be an unnecessary war.

On Aug. 1, 2004, The Sunday Times [of London} published an interview with an unnamed Italian source describing his role in preparing forgeries that buttressed the bogus allegations. The source said he was sorry to have played a role in passing along false intelligence.

The Washington Post reported in 2007: “Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time, showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.”

SOURCE: “HOW BOGUS LETTER BECAME A CASE FOR WAR; INTELLIGENCE FAILURES SURROUNDED INQUIRY ON IRAQ-NIGER URANIUM CLAIM,” BY PETER EISNER, WASHINGTON POST, APRIL 3, 2007

