The White House pointed the finger at the CIA today over a false accusation that Iraq tried to buy African uranium.
President George W. Bush said his claim that Iraq tried to buy nuclear material from Niger was approved by his "intelligence services". US national security adviser Ms Condoleezza Rice said the specific wording was approved by the CIA.
The White House acknowledged this week it had been a mistake to say Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had been trying to get African uranium because documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger proved to have been forged.
Mr Bush repeated he had been right to go to war against Saddam but declined to answer a reporter's question as to how the erroneous statement made it into his State of the Union address in January.
"I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services," Mr Bush said in Kampala, where he was meeting Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni as part of a five-nation African tour.
"It speaks in detail to the American people of the dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime. My government took the appropriate response to those dangers," he told reporters.
Ms Rice earlier said the CIA had approved the address in advance. "The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety. . . . If the CIA Director of Central Intelligence, had said 'take this out of the speech', then it would have been done," Ms Rice told reporters flying to Uganda from South Africa on Air Force One with Mr Bush.
But US television network CBS reported yesterday the White House had ignored a request by the CIA to remove the accusation from Mr Bush's address.
Critics have accused the Bush administration of a campaign to mislead the public by hyping a weapons of mass destruction threat posed by Iraq.