A rchive Date
[ 12-07-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Britain ]
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[http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2003/07/12/134340-ap.html
Britain's Straw defends disputed Iraq uranium charge
Sat, July 12, 2003
LONDON (AP) - Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Saturday defended Britain's publication of a disputed charge that Iraq tried to get uranium from Africa, saying the CIA expressed doubts about the allegation but did not say why.
Straw, in a letter to the House of Commons select committee on foreign affairs, said Britain was unaware until recently that a U.S. envoy went to Niger to investigate the claim and found it could not be substantiated.
Britain made the accusation in a September dossier about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The Foreign Office says it still believes the charge was true, although one of the documents suggesting deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's regime sought uranium in Niger has been exposed as fake.
The accusation is the subject of angry questions about how it ended up in U.S. President George W. Bush's state of the union speech in January. The White House says the charge was false, and Bush said Friday the CIA had reviewed his address and did not raise any alarms.
Straw, in the letter dated Friday and released by the Foreign Office Saturday, said Britain based its charge in part on intelligence it did not share with the United States.
He said the CIA had expressed reservations about the uranium claim. "However, the U.S. comment was unsupported by explanation and U.K. officials were confident that the dossier's statement was based on reliable intelligence which we had not shared with the U.S.... A judgment was therefore made to retain it."
The letter did not say why Britain declined to share its information with its ally, but Straw wrote that he had explained the reasons privately to the Parliamentary committee.
A Foreign Office spokeswoman said Britain still believes the disputed allegation is correct.
"We stand by what we said," she said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We think there's no reason to doubt the accuracy ... of the intelligence on which this dossier is based."
She added that the intelligence "drew on additional evidence other than documents."
Straw wrote that until press reports revealed U.S. envoy Joseph Wilson's early 2002 visit to Niger, Britain had been unaware of his trip. He said American officials have since confirmed they did not tell Britain of the visit.
Wilson's report, Straw wrote, "does indeed describe the denials of Niger government officials in early 2002 that a contract had been concluded for the sale of yellowcake to Iraq."
Yellowcake is a lightly processed form of uranium.
But Straw argued that part of Wilson's report bolstered the British claim. Wilson, he wrote, noted that an Iraqi delegation had in 1999 "sought the expansion of trade links with Niger - and that former Niger government officials believed that this was in connection with the procurement of yellowcake."
"Uranium is Niger's main export," Straw continued. "In other words, this element of Ambassador Wilson's report supports the statement in the government's dossier."
Bush attributed the allegation to Britain in his state of the union speech.
On Friday, the White House blamed the CIA for allowing the charge to be included in the address. CIA director George Tenet later took responsibility, saying the statement "did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and CIA should have ensured that it was removed."
Also Saturday, a newspaper charged that the British dossier drew heavily on information culled from the Internet and other public sources - although it claimed to rely mainly on intelligence.
The anti-war Independent newspaper said many of the September document's allegations resembled those in a January 2001 paper by then-U.S. defence secretary William Cohen; Senate testimony by Tenet; an unclassified CIA report to the American Congress; and a report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies study group.
The newspaper said the uranium claim did not appear to come from any of the public documents.
A Blair spokesman said Saturday that the government stands by the dossier and that it represented the assessment of the intelligence committee.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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