Iraq charge overblown

last updated 8 January 2015

Washington, D.C.

The White House acknowledged this week that President Bush should not have claimed that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa. It was the administration’s first admission that the claim, made in Bush’s State of the Union address, was based on discredited intelligence reports. A British parliamentary panel found that the CIA had debunked the information before Bush cited it as evidence that Iraq had re-started its nuclear program. A former U.S. ambassador wrote in The New York Times that before the State of the Union address, he had investigated the uranium purchase for Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, and concluded it never happened. The White House would not say who inserted the uranium claim into the address.