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Senate seeks National Security Council interviews
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Senate Intelligence Committee has requested permission to interview members of the National Security Council staff, the committee's chairman said Thursday. The committee is investigating how a controversial phrase about Iraq's purported pursuit of uranium in Africa made its way into President George W. Bush's State of the Union speech in January. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, told CNN the request has been made but would not reveal who would be interviewed. Roberts would say only that the request applied to "persons" on the National Security Council staff and that they would be interviewed by the Senate committee's staff. "As soon as we do that, they may be called as a witness [before the committee] and they may not," he said. Roberts also said it would be "very premature" to say whether national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be interviewed as part of the investigation. "But I will say that we will take this inquiry wherever it goes, and we'll simply let the chips fall where they may," he said. In his State of the Union address, Bush advanced his case for waging war against Iraq. He said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The White House now concedes that those 16 words should not have been included in the speech because U.S. intelligence could not substantiate the claim. During his visit to Washington Thursday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, "We stand by that intelligence." On July 11, CIA Director George Tenet took responsibility for the mistake, saying the CIA should never have signed off on that language in the speech. On Wednesday, Tenet met behind closed doors with the Senate Intelligence Committee for five hours, outlining the discussions between the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency during preparation of the presidential address. Sources told CNN that Tenet talked extensively about contacts between the CIA and the National Security Council. Other sources identified the principal players in those negotiations as Robert Joseph, the NSC's senior director for proliferation strategy, and Alan Foley, who heads the CIA's counter proliferation effort. On Thursday, Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, blamed unnamed "people in the White House" for the error. Durbin serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "Someone in the White House decided that they would cut a corner and allow the president to say this by putting in that phrase, 'based on British intelligence,'" Durbin said. "I would think the president of the United States would be angered over the disservice done to him by members of his staff." White House spokesman Scott McClellan dismissed Durbin's charge as "absolute nonsense," noting that Durbin opposed the congressional resolution authorizing military action against Iraq. "There are some in Congress who are seeking to rewrite history," McClellan said. "They are sitting there seeking to justify their votes against the action that we took. But the bottom line is America is safer -- the world is safer -- because of the action we took." Roberts, too, dismissed suggestions that the NSC had pressured the CIA to acquiesce to the language in the speech, saying nothing in Tenet's testimony would back up that charge. "Of course, different senators have different interpretations of the same thing, but in my view, there was no pressure," he said.
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