Washington, July 19: The White House has released excerpts from a classified October 2002 intelligence document to demonstrate how flawed intelligence on Iraq's nuclear-weapons ambitions wound up in a speech by President George W Bush.
The document cites "compelling evidence" of such a program - but it also reflects pre-war divisions within the US intelligence community, including a State Department dismissal of reports that Saddam Hussein was shopping for uranium ore in Africa as "highly dubious."
"We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD (weapons of mass destruction) program," the CIA and other intelligence agencies concluded, according to the documents.
The Bush administration released the material - a sanitised version of the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate prepared for the president - as it sought to shield Bush from the rising criticism that he misled the public in making his case for war with Iraq in his January 28 speech.
Administration aides suggested that the eight pages of excerpts, out of 90 in the document, demonstrate that the notion that Saddam was trying to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program permeated the US intelligence community - and was not just based on a suspect British intelligence report that relied in part on forged documents.
Bureau Report
