President Bush said on Saturday he had confidence in CIA Director George Tenet and considered a controversy about false U.S. claims that Iraq tried to buy African uranium to be closed. Tenet issued a statement on Friday evening in Washington, saying: "The president had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound."

" All of the papers reveal that the Niger report had been previously scrubbed by the CIA from a speech Bush delivered October 7. And by January 31, three days after the State of the Union, Secretary of State Colin Powell had already decided to omit the charge from his February 5 speech at the United Nations, after his staff decided that it was "not credible."

The WP fronts a new poll which found that President Bush's overall approval rating has fallen nine points over the last eighteen days to 59 percent.

"I don't think you know what you've done," Boxer told Dickey. "You've motivated us to look closely at consolidation. When you said earlier that your local staff 'fell in line,' that was a dead giveaway."

the CIA was so leery of the allegation that it asked the White House to attribute it solely to British intelligence. The speech did so."

"Administration officials involved in drafting another speech Mr. Bush gave about Iraq, in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, said that at the C.I.A.'s behest, they had removed any mention of the central piece of intelligence about African uranium ? a report about an effort by Iraq to obtain "yellowcake," which contains uranium ore, in Niger. No one has fully explained how, given that early October warning to the White House, a version of the same charge resurfaced in the early drafts of the State of the Union address just three months later, and stayed there, draft after draft."
"This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude"