Prometheus 6   

A Shifting Spotlight on Uranium Sales
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, July 14 � The White House defense of President Bush's State of the Union speech comes down to this: The president was technically accurate when he cited a British report alleging Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa, but he never should have said it.

The evidence "did not meet the standards we use for the president," said Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser and the minder of Mr. Bush's pronouncements. That is putting it politely. American intelligence agencies questioned the accuracy of the British report, and even doubted their own evidence.

… But if the White House's changing � and sometimes contradictory � time line of events leading up to the speech is to be believed, Ms. Rice's aides knew as early as October that some underlying evidence was suspect. The C.I.A., according to that time line, changed its assessment of the reliability of that evidence three times in four months � enough to make clear that there was reason to doubt the quality of the evidence.

That has led to questions that Mr. Bush and his aides have still not answered. Why did Mr. Bush's aides keep coming back to the Africa case as "an emblematic example" of Mr. Hussein's surreptitious activities, as one administration official terms it, if so many in the intelligence world were questioning it?

Further, how did it survive so many drafts of the State of the Union speech in January, only to be thrown out, days later, by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who found the evidence so thin that he dared not take it to the United Nations for his own presentation?

By the time Mr. Powell made it to the C.I.A. to prepare his own case against Iraq � three nights after the State of the Union address � the intelligence agencies were "not carrying it as a credible item," he said in an interview. How it met Mr. Bush's standards and not Mr. Powell's is one of the mysteries the White House has not addressed.

The answer, some in the intelligence world say, is that the evidence did not change � but the political environment around it did.