The George W. Bush administration has acknowledged for the first time that the president's claim in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Africa was an error, The Washington Post reported yesterday.
"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," a senior Bush administration official said in a statement authorized by the White House, the newspaper reported.
The report said the official's statement came in response to questions about a British parliamentary commission report that raised questions about the reliability of British intelligence cited by Bush in his Jan. 28 speech.
The statement, released late on Monday, effectively conceded that intelligence underlying the claim was wrong, the newspaper said.
Controversy is raging in the US and Britain over charges that the governments of the two countries manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to make the case for war against Iraq.
No evidence of such weapons has been found by the occupying forces in Iraq.
The International Atomic Energy Agency in March dismissed a report about Iraq buying uranium from Niger as being based on forged documents.
Former US ambassador Joseph Wilson disclosed that he had traveled to Africa last year to investigate the report.
Wilson, Washington's envoy to Gabon from 1992 to 1995, told The New York Times and NBC on Sunday that he had reported back to the CIA that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
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