US: The White House has acknowledged for the first time that President Bush should not have claimed in his State of the Union speech on January 28th that Iraq had tried to import uranium from an African country.
The admission comes in the wake of the UK parliamentary report discrediting British intelligence about an alleged attempt in the late 1990s by Saddam Hussein to purchase uranium for nuclear weapons from Niger.
In his January 28th speech, which made the case for war against Iraq based on the danger from weapons of mass destruction, Mr Bush said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
The UK parliamentary commission said on Monday it was unclear why the British government had asserted as a "bald claim" in its pre-war announcements that Iraq had sought to obtain uranium from Africa.
Pressed throughout Monday for a response, the White House at first refused to concede that the British report undercut a key element of Mr Bush's case for war. White House spokesman Mr Ari Fleischer sought to dismiss the issue, saying: "We see nothing that would dissuade us from the President's broader statement."
However after Mr Bush had left on his trip to Africa on Monday evening, a senior administration official said in a statement authorised by the White House: "Knowing all that we know, the reference to Iraq's attempts to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech."
The admission raises serious questions about how the claim got into Mr Bush's speech. The report had been discredited almost a year beforehand by US intelligence agencies after documents purporting to prove an attempted Iraqi uranium purchase were passed from Italian to British intelligence and forwarded to Washington.
Early in 2002, the CIA, at the request of US Vice-President Dick Cheney's office sent a former US ambassador, Mr Joseph Wilson, to Niger to check out the claim. He quickly established it was fraudulent, a point he confirmed in an account he wrote for the New York Times on Sunday - his first public statement on the affair.
Niger officials who allegedly authorised the deal had long been out of office and no uranium could be sold by Niger without the authorisation of an international consortium that controlled supplies.
This information was relayed to Mr Cheney's office in the White House and other administration departments many months before Mr Bush made his January speech.
It has been widely reported in the US since the fall of Baghdad that the administration was well aware that the claim was false long before the war, but this is the first time that the White House has been forced to confront the issue directly.
The admission also raises questions about an unqualified statement made by Mr Cheney in a television interview just before the US-led invasion in March that Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons programme.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that many intelligence agents were shocked to hear Mr Bush repeat the misleading uranium claim in his speech, delivered before the joint houses of Congress and viewed by millions of Americans.
US officials have refused to say how the fraudulent claim got into Mr Bush's text, or when the President first knew it was false.