Washington - The White House on Tuesday dealt a devastating blow to British Prime Minister Tony Blair after it rejected as flawed British claims that ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein attempted to buy uranium from Africa to restart his nuclear weapons programme.
The Bush administration was in full retreat as officials admitted that the allegation should not have been included in United States President George Bush's state of the union address. The US admission represented the first major split between London and Washington over the case against Saddam and exploded into a full-scale row in Westminster as Blair told senior MPs that the British government stood by its story.
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But Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour Party backbenchers demanded that Blair release the intelligence behind the uranium allegation to an independent inquiry.
In his address to the US Congress in January, Bush said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." But a statement from the White House on Monday night said: "Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the state of the union speech."
| 'Knowing all that we know now, the reference should not have been included in the speech' |
It is the first time the US has admitted publicly that key "evidence" backing the claim that Iraq was trying to "reconstitute its nuclear weapons programme" was incorrect.
On Tuesday Blair insisted that the intelligence services stood by their allegation, despite a report by the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) in March that dismissed the claims as based on crude forgeries.
He said: "There was an historic link between Niger and Iraq. In the 1980s Iraq purchased somewhere in the region of 200 tons of uranium from Niger. The evidence that we had that the Iraqi government had gone back to try to purchase further amounts of uranium from Niger did not come from these so-called forged documents. They came from separate intelligence."
| The claims were based on crude forgeries |
- This article was originally published on page 2 of Cape Times on July 09, 2003
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