For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
July 11, 2003
Press Gaggle with Ari Fleischer and Dr. Condoleeza Rice
Aboard Air Force One
En Route Entebbe, Uganda
12:15 P.M. (Local)
MR. FLEISCHER: Good morning. Let us begin. The President will
shortly arrive into Uganda, where the President will have a meeting
with the President of Uganda. I anticipate the main topics of
discussion will be AIDS, trade. Particularly here in Uganda, however,
the President wants to highlight for all the world to see the
successful Ugandan model and how they have tackled aggressively and
forthrightly the issue of AIDS with success.
The President will, after the meeting, arrive at the AIDS Support
Organization Center, where he will receive a briefing on actual AIDS
treatment programs that are innovative, up and running, and
successful. He will meet with people who have AIDS who are being
treated. He will take a tour of the TASO sector, and then he will
depart en route for Abuja, Nigeria, where he will spend the night.
Dr. Rice has reflections on the overall trip and then we're happy
to take your questions.
Q Are we on the record, now?
MR. FLEISCHER: On the record.
Q Can we do it on camera, then?
MR. FLEISCHER: It's gaggle.
DR. RICE: We're on the record or background?
MR. FLEISCHER: On the record. This will be a gaggle.
DR. RICE: Okay, fine.
The President has had a great trip to Africa thus far. I think he
has had an opportunity to highlight American interests in the future of
Africa, American hopes for the future of Africa.
He's talked quite a lot about trade. Yesterday, he had an
opportunity, for instance, to see what AGOA has meant for small
artisans in Africa. He saw different displays of carvings and weavings
that people had done. And he mentioned, in fact, last night that it
had been heartening to -- it's one thing to have AGOA on paper, it's
quite another to have a chance to see some of the products that people
are now selling as a result.
He's had very good meetings with the leaders and now -- and had a
chance yesterday in Botswana to pay a tribute to President Mogae, who's
one of the real leaders in terms of democracy and free markets and
trade on the entire continent. He also had a chance with President
Mogae to look at the efforts Botswana is now making to deal with what
is an exceptionally high infection rate of HIV/AIDS -- believed to be
as much perhaps as 38 percent of the population, which is extraordinary
-- and talked with the Minister of Health and others who are at the
forefront of trying to deal with that problem.
When he goes to Uganda, as Ari said, he will be meeting with
President Museveni, who, frankly, has been one of the inspirations for
the President's own interest in AIDS, because the Ugandan success in
reversing the trend shows that it can be done with education, with
openness about the problem. And of course, now, given the President's
commitment, large commitment of $15 billion to the AIDS pandemic, we
also hope to treat and save lives through the availability of
anti-retrovirals.
The President had a chance also to talk about some of the deep
conflict situations in Africa. That's been very important on the first
day, of course, with the President of ECOWAS, Kufour. But today when
he talks to President Museveni, he'll underscore the important of
Ugandan support for the peace process that is underway in the DROC,
because the DROC's neighbors, as well as the leadership of the DROC,
have to be committed to the Lusaka process. So he will talk to them
about that, and then he'll go on to Nigeria. And we can talk about
Nigeria tomorrow.
By the way, we went to a great game preserve yesterday and saw
nature in action. (Laughter.)
Q Dr. Rice --
MR. FLEISCHER: Child credits. (Laughter.)
Q -- love nature like you'd like to be loved yourself.
DR. RICE: Yes, the elephants weren't nearly so rambunctious by the
time we go there. (Laughter.)
Q The elephants were shut-ins, now that you think about it.
Q Dr. Rice, in the Congo, has the United States decided to
support a larger U.N. peacekeeping force there? And will Bush talk
about that or announce that today?
DR. RICE: There won't be any announcements today, but we are in
discussions with the U.N. about sizing properly the force in the
Congo. And we've generally been supportive in making some alterations
to that, if possible.
The Congo has a real chance of getting resolved here because there
is a plan for a transitional government that -- President Mbeki
described his work with President Kabile on that. We have the French
force in place for a short period of time. And I think everybody
understands that we need very much to seize the initiative. So if
there's more that can be done, the United States is going to be
supportive of that. But the President's not making any announcements
of it because we're still in consultations about that issue.
Q Is he going to be talking with anyone about the Sudan? Is
Danforth going to be with him?
DR. RICE: We will talk about the Sudan. Again, it's an
opportunity. They are in a position to have a deal on the Sudan, which
when you think about a couple of years ago seems pretty remarkable.
The President will talk to President Museveni, again, who's one of the
major players in that. He has talked recently to Senator Danforth, who
is going back to Sudan and to the region, I think, in five or six
days. So, yes, he will talk about the Sudan. But nobody wants to
prematurely get too hopeful about what has been a really tough
situation. But there's a lot of belief that we actually have a chance
to get something done there.
Q Can I just interject one more time? Is there a reason why
we wouldn't do this on camera if Dr. Rice is on the record?
MR. FLEISCHER: Because this is our standard way of doing gaggles,
especially in the back of the plane.
Q But it's usually on background.
MR. FLEISCHER: Well, we standardly come back on the plane and try
to mix it up. Remember Secretary Powell came back on the previous
European trip on the record, but on gaggle, to begin the European
trip. This is my way of trying to bring other people back here for
people to get questions.
Q I appreciate that. But I just want to register a complaint
for the networks that all of these comments are going to be on the
record and in the newspapers and on the wires, but we're not going to
see her on camera.
Q Do we expect any kind of announcement on Liberia on this
trip before we go back Washington?
DR. RICE: No, I don't think you should expect an announcement
while we're still on the trip. The assessment team is out there. It's
doing its work. It has been very beneficial for the President to be
able to talk directly with President Kufour and with others about what
might be needed in Liberia. But we're going to have to get back. The
President is going to have to hear from the assessment team. And we
have to look at what's necessary.
What should be very clear is that the President has said that the
United States is committed to trying to help the U.N. and the regional
leaders find a way to bring stability to Liberia and to get Charles
Taylor out of office and to get a political process begun there. But
the exact nature of that involvement, we're going to have to wait to
see what's really needed.
Q What's the back-and-forth on Taylor at this point? I mean,
he says he won't go until the force is there. And we're suggesting
that there shouldn't be a condition. Is this subject to negotiation?
DR. RICE: It's not a subject of negotiation. There shouldn't be
any conditions for his leaving. I think the timing of his leaving is
something that will have to be worked out with the people who are
working with him. But he shouldn't be making conditions at this
point.
Q Is it still your position that he has to leave first before
any troops arrive?
DR. RICE: I don't think we've ever said he had to leave first.
What we've said is he has to leave, because he is the source of
instability. And no force of stabilization is going to be able to
stabilize with him there. I mean he is the problem. So it's a
practical point.
Q But are you worried that he seems to be imposing new
conditions every time he opens his mouth?
DR. RICE: Well, there shouldn't be any conditions.
Q Right.
DR. RICE: He really should understand what he's done was contrary
--
Q On AIDS, the President wanted $2 billion the first year.
The House has voted for a sum that less than that. The exact figure
escapes my mind right now. But Secretary Powell said yesterday,
essentially, we'd work with what we can get. Does the President not
intend to try --
DR. RICE: No, obviously, we'll work with what we can get. But the
President believes very strongly in full funding of this.
Q -- fight for it --
DR. RICE: We are fighting for it.
Q Is he going to fight for the problem --
Q Give us -- how are you fighting for it? Is he calling
people?
DR. RICE: Call on the telephone, and we're making phone calls.
The President believes that this commitment -- which just so everybody
is clear on the breakdown, it's $10 billion in new money, but this
unifies the $5 billion spent, plus the $10 billion into a single
program. Some of it will go into the Global Fund; the rest into
bilateral programs. This is an AIDS emergency, and the emergency
portion of this, the President feels very strongly we've waited too
long. It's not as if there aren't good uses for the money, and so he's
pushing very hard on Congress to fully fund.
Q I'd like to ask one on the trip and one on the Niger
situation. On the trip, the President has made a lot of broad
commitments, including the money on trade. How committed are you to
really following through on these things when you get back? Especially
on trade, when you're going to have to take a lot of political heat on
agricultural subsidies, on textile imports. Coming into an election
year, it's easy for Africa to get pushed to the back burner again. How
do you make sure that this really gets done?
On Niger, we understand there's --
DR. RICE: Let me answer that first.
Q Okay.
DR. RICE: Then we'll get to the rest of that. The President is a
person who believes in free trade because he believes it's good for
global growth. That means it's good for the United States, it's good
for American workers, and it's good for the development of places like
Africa. And so it's a fundamental part of his program. And so he's
going to continue to push on free trade.
He's already said that he wants AGOA extended to 2008 because we
believe this has been extremely beneficial for Africa and for
increasing development. You can talk a lot about development
assistance, but really, trade is a real multiplier for developing
countries. And so he's going to continue to press on these issues.
On agricultural subsidies, the U.S. position is clear: We think
that agricultural subsidies ought to be rolled back. But the Europeans
-- we can't do this unilaterally -- the Europeans are the real problem
when it comes to agricultural subsidies. Our markets are pretty open
to third-world product.
And so the right way to deal with this particular issue, really, is
in the context of the WTO. And so we welcomed the moves that the
Europeans made recently on agricultural subsidies. Bob Zoellick is
going to continue to work with his WTO colleagues and also with Lamy on
this issue. But the President is going to continue to push free
trade.
Q As the only European on the plane, could I just ask you --
so if the Europeans were to lower their subsidies, would you do the
same?
DR. RICE: The United States has always believed that lower
subsidies are a good thing.
Q But you only imposed the high ones a year ago?
DR. RICE: No, but -- it's a long story, but the farm bill, in
terms of aggregate numbers, does not increase the subsidies, in fact,
it lowers it.
Q Dr. Rice, there are a lot of reports, apparently overnight,
that CIA people had informed the NSC well before the State of the Union
that they had trouble the reference in the speech. Can you tell us
specifically what your office had heard, what you had passed along to
the President on that?
DR. RICE: The CIA cleared the speech. We have a clearance process
that sends speeches out to relevant agencies -- in our case, the NSC,
it's usually State, Defense, the CIA, sometimes the Treasury. The CIA
cleared the speech in its entirety.
Now, the sentence in question comes from the notion the Iraqis were
seeking yellow cake. And, remember, it says, "seeking yellow cake in
Africa" is there in the National Intelligence Estimate. The National
Intelligence Estimate is the document the that Director of Central
Intelligence publishes as the collective view of the intelligence
agencies about the status of any particular issue.
That was relied on to, like many other things in the National
Intelligence Estimate, relied on to write the President's speech. The
CIA cleared on it. There was even some discussion on that specific
sentence, so that it reflected better what the CIA thought. And the
speech was cleared.
Now, I can tell you, if the CIA, the Director of Central
Intelligence, had said, take this out of the speech, it would have been
gone, without question. What we've said subsequently is, knowing what
we now know, that some of the Niger documents were apparently forged,
we wouldn't have put this in the President's speech -- but that's
knowing what we know now.
The President of the United States, we have a higher standard for
what we put in presidential speeches. The British continue to stand by
their report. The CIA's NIE continues to talk about efforts to acquire
yellow cake in various African countries. But we have a high standard
for the President's speeches. We don't make the President his own fact
witness, we have a high standard for them. That's why we send them out
for clearance. And had we heard from the DCI or the Agency that they
didn't want that sentence in the speech, it would not have been in the
speech. The President was not going to get up and say something that
the CIA --
Q Dr. Rice, it sounds as if you're blaming the CIA here.
DR. RICE: No, this is a clearance process. And a lot of things
happen. We've said now we wouldn't have put it in the speech if we had
known what we know now. This was a process that we've followed many,
many times. But I can just assure you that if -- and I think -- maybe
you want to ask this question of the DCI, but we've talked about it.
If the DCI had said, there's a problem with this, we would have said
it's out of the speech.
For whatever reason -- and I'm not blaming anybody. The State of
the Union -- people are writing speeches, a lot is going on. But I can
assure you that the President did not knowingly, before the American
people, say something that we thought to be false. It's just
outrageous that anybody would claim that. He did not knowingly say
anything that we thought to be false. And, in fact, we still don't
know the status of Saddam Hussein's efforts to acquire yellow cake.
What we know is that one of the documents underlying that case was
found to be a forgery.
Q Dr. Rice, given that, does the President -- given that the
CIA cleared the speech, does the President remain confident in the
CIA's Director?
DR. RICE: Absolutely. The CIA Director, George Tenet, has been a
terrific DCI and he has served everybody very, very well. And we have
a good relationship with the CIA. We wouldn't put anything knowingly
in the speech that was false; I'm sure they wouldn't put anything
knowingly in the speech that was false. In this case, this particular
line shouldn't have gotten in because it was not of the quality that we
would put into presidential speeches, despite the fact that it was in
the NIE --
Q But, Condi, it's apparently the case that the CIA didn't
even check the documents, didn't even discover the forgery until after
the speech. And now there's a report that in September of '02 -- if I
have this correct -- the Post is saying the CIA was encouraging the
British to back off of that claim. So I'm trying to understand the
sequencing here. Are you saying -- so my question is, in hindsight,
would you say that the CIA did not properly vet this alleged sale?
DR. RICE: David, this was a complicated matter of a sale. There
were other reports, as well, about Saddam Hussein trying to acquire
yellow cake. It was not this Niger document alone. There are even
other African countries that are cited in the NIE, not just Niger.
We also knew, let's remember, that this is the context of a nuclear
program in which the seeking of yellow cake is only a small piece of
the story. It includes training of nuclear scientists; it includes
rebuilding certain infrastructure that had been associated with nuclear
weapons; it includes a clandestine procurement network. Things that
we're finding out now -- for instance, that the scientist buried
uranium -- I'm sorry, centrifuge pieces in his front yard. So one
thing that you have to do is to put this piece about seeking yellow
cake in the broader context of what was known to be an active effort by
the Iranians to try and reconstitute their program.
But let me just go to the point you made, David. The CIA -- I've
read the reports that you've also read, that there were -- the British
were told they shouldn't put this in the paper. I've read those
reports. All that I can tell you is that if there were doubts about
the underlying intelligence in the NIE, those doubts were not
communicated to the President. The only thing that was there in the
NIE was a kind of a standard INR footnote, which is kind of 59 pages
away from the bulk of the NIE. That's the only thing that's there.
And you have footnotes all the time in CIA -- I mean, in NIEs. So if
there was a concern about the underlying intelligence there, the
President was unaware of that concern and as was I.
Q You just said that the sentence, itself, was constructed
reflecting some thoughts that the CIA had on the doubt. If I recall,
the President said in his speech that, the British are reporting this
-- about the transfer. Should we infer from that that there were some
doubts within the Agency about the veracity of the claim, so that in
the speech it was safer to defer to what was the British intelligence
that they were confident in?
DR. RICE: The British document was an unclassified document, and
so cite the unclassified document. The underlying intelligence to the
British document is in the NIE, which is both talking about what a
foreign service had said and talking about other attempts to acquire
yellow cake. So the underlying documentation here is the NIE. The
Agency cleared the speech and cleared it in its entirety.
Q If I could just follow up. On that sentence, you said that
the CIA changed the -- that things were done to accommodate the CIA.
What was done?
DR. RICE: Some specifics about amount and place were taken out.
Q -- taken out then?
DR. RICE: Some specifics about amount and place were taken out.
Q Was "place" Niger?
Q You won't say what place --
DR. RICE: No, there are several -- there are several African
countries noted. And if you say -- if you notice, it says "Africa," it
doesn't say "Niger."
MR. FLEISCHER: Yes. To be clear, the sentence in the State of the
Union, just off the top of my head, stated, according to British
reports, Iraq is seeking to acquire uranium from African nations or
Africa. That's the sentence that was stated.
Q Dr. Rice, if the intelligence was the same used by the
British government and by your government, and you had doubts about
this, did you communicate to the British government at some stage that
their continuing insistence --
DR. RICE: You'll have to ask the CIA what they communicated to the
British government. I'm not -- I don't know --
Q But they were still wedded to this information while you,
at some stage, already said, well, this is not --
DR. RICE: No, no. That's not what we said. Let's go back over
what it is we've said. We've said that given subsequent information
abut the Niger documents, this -- and some of the apparent uncertainty
that was out there -- it doesn't rise to the level that we would put in
a presidential speech. We don't say it's false. And I heartily object
to headlines that say it was false, because nobody has still said that
this was false. There are still reports out there that they sought
materials from the DROC, that they sought materials from Somalia. In
fact, there is -- if you look at what has even come back on Niger, it
says that the Niger government denies that they sold it. So I'm not
standing here to say to you, we know that these claims about Africa are
false.
What I'm saying to you is we have higher standards for the
President's speech, and that's why we have a process that we send
speeches to the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the
Director of Central Intelligence Agency, and any other affected Cabinet
officer.
Q What do we know about the source, or sources of the
documents? Are they people -- again, without getting into anything
that would compromise anybody or any operation -- are they people with
a proven track record? Did that come up?
DR. RICE: There are a couple of bodies looking at this, including
the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and I think
they'll be able to answer those questions. We don't generally get into
that kind of issue.
Q But in the back-and-forth, especially with the massaging
the language to the satisfaction of the -- I mean, was there any, even
casual discussion about --
DR. RICE: I'm going to be very clear, all right? The President's
speech -- that sentence was changed, right? And with the change in
that sentence, the speech was cleared. Now, again, if the Agency had
wanted that sentence out, it would have been gone. And the Agency did
not say that they wanted that speech out -- that sentence out of the
speech. They cleared the speech.
Now, the State of the Union is a big speech, a lot of things
happen. I'm really not blaming anybody for what happened. But there
is a fact here, in the way that we clear speeches.
Q So a week later, Colin Powell goes to the U.N., and he
decides, as he told us yesterday, not to put that sentence in at all.
So what was the new development in those seven days that led him to
take it out all together?
DR. RICE: Well, first of all --
Q The time line seems a bit curious.
DR. RICE: He took out a lot of things. But I was with Secretary
Powell when he was doing a lot of this. You will remember that it was
the Secretary's own intelligence arm, the INR, that was the one that
within the overall intelligence assessment had objected to that
sentence, had said that they doubts about -- not to that sentence, had
doubts about the uranium yellow cake story. So remember that it was
the Secretary of State's own agency, the INR, that had in the consensus
report, the NIE, taken a footnote to that.
Q But isn't it slightly strange that you have different
agencies with different reports and different sentences? I mean, not
everyone is singing from the same song sheet here.
DR. RICE: But let me just go through the process, because it's not
at all unusual. We have several intelligence agencies, not just one.
We have the Central Intelligence Agency, a Defense Intelligence Agency,
the State Department has its own intelligence agency. And there is a
process which the Director of Central Intelligence, who is the
coordinator for all of those agencies, runs which is called the
National Intelligence Estimate. The National Intelligence Estimate is
supposed to come to a conclusion that is the considered, joint opinion
of all of those intelligence agencies. If at the end of that process,
a particular agency still has a reservation, they take a footnote. And
so the INR took a footnote in this case.
Q But it's in the Estimate?
DR. RICE: It's in the Estimate. It's, by the way, in another
section, but it is in the Estimate. But the DCI is responsible for
delivering a judgment, a consensus judgment of the intelligence
community, which is called the National Intelligence Estimate. And
that's what the President --
Q Is there a chance that that particular citation could be
declassified, so we could see it?
DR. RICE: You know, we don't want to try to get into kind of
selective declassification, but we're looking at what can be made
available.
Q -- the kind of terminology of how footnotes -- if the CIA
had taken a footnote, would that have meant that's the end of the
sentence?
DR. RICE: No.
Q What are footnotes --
DR. RICE: I understand. The Americans --
Q Bear with us, bear with us.
DR. RICE: No, no, no.
Q We're old Europe here.
DR. RICE: The CIA sits as the CIA, as the Central Intelligence
Agency. Its head is both the Director of Central Intelligence and the
head of that agency. Then you have a DIA and INR, and so on and so
on. I'm now speaking from my own experience, not from my -- it's
fairly rare that you get a CIA objection to a DCI product, because they
are one and the same.
Q Some are more --
DR. RICE: Well, the CIA is the premier intelligence agency for the
United States. And it is the one with a worldwide network, and so
forth. So it's maybe not so surprising. But you do get footnotes from
other agencies to the consensus argument fairly often. But what INR
did not take a footnote to is the consensus view that the Iraqis were
actively trying to pursue a nuclear weapons program, reconstituting and
so forth.
Q So, Condi, if you look at this --
DR. RICE: And as you remember, the aluminum tubes, INR also had a
part.
Q So if you step back from this, Secretary Powell said
yesterday that relying on and reporting out intelligence amounts to a
judgment call. So there was a choice here. You all could have been
cautious or aggressive on this intelligence. You chose to be pretty
aggressive, even though in a State of the Union speech, you hung it on
the British.
DR. RICE: David, the British report was an open-source report, all
right?
Q But the American people don't know all the this. What they
know is when the President stands up in the State of the Union to
declare something, pretty important --
DR. RICE: When the President stood up in the State of the Union
and said, we had reports from -- the British were the primary reporters
on this, I mean, the NIE also relying on the British reporting on this
particular piece -- that we had reporting that Saddam Hussein had
sought yellow cake in Africa. That's all it says.
Now, as I've said to you several times, that may well still be
true. It is not, given all that we know of equality, that we would put
in a State of the Union, which is why we've been saying to you, look,
it should not have gotten in. It's not that it was false. It's not
that it was erroneous. It was that there was a certain quality to the
reporting that we now believe doesn't rise to the level of a
presidential speech.
Q You would agree you were pretty aggressive in your
interpretation then?
DR. RICE: No. The NIE says, he's seeking to acquire yellow cake,
and cites several African countries. There's nothing aggressive about
that. But now, knowing that some of the underlying reporting was
problematic, we wouldn't put it there. But again, David, we do have a
clearance process and the Agency cleared it.
Q During the week leading up to Secretary Powell's
presentation at the U.N. then, was it the State Department's concerns
about this intelligence that led to the review and then the decision by
Secretary Powell not to put this in? Or was it something that the CIA
or you or British intelligence or somebody else was concerned about?
DR. RICE: It was not even discussed in that way. Again, the
Secretary has an intelligence arm. That intelligence arm had a
particular view of this issue. If you got to the Secretary's
statement, you will also see that on the aluminum tubes, the Secretary
says that there's some disagreement about the nature of these aluminum
tubes. That was also a consensus judgment of the NIA that the aluminum
tubes were likely for nuclear centrifuges. The INR had taken an
exception. So the Secretary noted that exception, as well.
But I want to go back to something. This is in the context of a
broad set of -- broad and deep record of intelligence about procurement
networks, about training of scientists, a man who in 1991 was way
closer to a nuclear weapon than anybody thought that he was, and that
where there were no doubts that he was trying -- he wanted to acquire
nuclear weapons and was trying to keep that infrastructure in place.
So you have to put it in that context.
Q Then what happened in those seven days --
DR. RICE: I'm saying that when we put it together, put together
the Secretary's remarks, the Secretary decided that he would caveat the
aluminum tubes, which he did -- he said there's some disagreement about
what this might be -- and he decided that he would not use the uranium
story. The Secretary also has an intelligence arm that happened to
hold that view. But the NIE, which, by the way, the Agency was
standing by at the time of the -- the time of the State of the Union,
and was standing by at the time of the Secretary's speech, has the
yellow cake story in it, had the aluminum tube story in it. Now, if
there were doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those
doubts were not communicated to the President, to the Vice President,
or to me.
Q What we're trying to get at -- we're trying to get at, was
there in the week -- again, only a week passed between when it was
useful information, worth putting out to the public, and when the
Secretary decided it wasn't. We're trying to get at what discussion
there was, if any, or whether it was a triage, you have other examples
that he liked better? I mean --
DR. RICE: -- but I -- there was no discussion in which I was
involved about any problems with this, and therefore, the Secretary
would not use it. I'm not surprised that given that the Secretary's
own agency, the INR, had reservations with it, that the Secretary would
decide --
Q Is it fair to conclude -- is it --
Q -- you're saying that the Secretary of State is overruling
the President --
DR. RICE: He's not overruling the President's judgment. The
Secretary of State said, you know, I don't want to use this particular
piece of information, as I understand it. I don't remember this -- I
don't think this discussion took place of this specific piece of
information, but it did not get into the Secretary's remarks because
the Secretary decided not to put it there. He told me yesterday that
he decided it was not of that quality.
Q Is it fair to say then, Dr. Rice, that the only thing that
changed in the seven days was just the person speaking?
DR. RICE: I can't give you -- I can't say yes or no to that. All
right? What I do know is there wasn't a discussion of, oh, this should
never have been in the President's speech, let's not put it in the
Secretary's speech, no.
Q Were they put together on separate tracks?
DR. RICE: To a certain extent, they were moving along in
parallel.
Q But isn't this a crucial issue? Did the President -- but
you're discounting this. You're saying that the President relied upon
a judgment by the CIA that it was solid enough to report out this
intelligence in the State of the Union. A week later the Secretary of
State decides it's not solid enough to do so. And you're saying it's
because he had his own intelligence? You're shaking your head -- tell
me what I'm not getting.
DR. RICE: No, David, what you're not getting is the following:
The President made a statement in the State of the Union that in the
NIE was the judgment of the intelligence community. The President
didn't exaggerate that statement, he didn't make it up. The NIE says
Saddam Hussein was seeking this yellow cake, and there are reports that
he's seeking it in other African countries. It goes into the State of
the Union.
The Secretary of State is putting together, on a somewhat parallel
track, a presentation before the United Nations Security Council. And
it's very broad and it's got lots of stuff in it. There is a lot of
things the Secretary decided not to use and a lot of things that he
decided to use. I'm going to tell you, we never really thought that
this yellow cake issue was a major issue, because the overwhelming
story about Iraqi nuclear reconstitution was really based fundamentally
on every -- on these other factors. And so this yellow cake issue, we
did not consider to be a major issue. So I'm also not surprised the
Secretary didn't put it in.
Q But when we reported the State of the Union address, that
was one of the headlines that came out of it.
DR. RICE: Yes, much to our surprise.
Q But it was written as such, as well. I mean, we were meant
to notice that line.
DR. RICE: It cited a public document, which probably helped. It
was also Britain which probably helped.
Q That was my next question. Sorry, Dr. Rice.
DR. RICE: But the fact is, this was one among many issues about
the nuclear program. And so when the Secretary talks about the nuclear
program, he talks about -- he was also, by the way, mostly concerned to
do things that fit into a presentation that had some impact. So there
were a lot of things he left on the cutting floor because they couldn't
be visualized. There were a lot of things he left on the cutting floor
because it didn't make the case powerfully enough. So a lot got left
on the cutting floor.
Q Just one brief one, Dr. Rice. Are you saying that in
hindsight, with the experience that we're going through now, you would
be more careful to rely on British intelligence in the future --
DR. RICE: No.
Q -- especially when it comes to putting it into State of the
Union addresses?
DR. RICE: No. It has nothing to do with British intelligence,
nothing to do with British intelligence. We have great trust and faith
in British intelligence. It is the fact that the underlying -- some of
the underlying information later turned out not to be true, or turned
out to be -- there apparently was a forged document involved. Anybody
who, knowing that, would not say, oh, perhaps we shouldn't have put
that in the State of the Union, would be pulling your leg. Of course,
you step back and say, had I known that there was a forged document
here, would I put this in the State of the Union? No.
But even with the forged document, there are other reports of his
seeking yellow cake in Africa. It's just that we have a higher
standard for the President. We don't make him his own fact witness.
That's why we send things out to people and say, you know, you have
problems with this.
Q Did the Secretary of State, during this seven-day period
between the State of the Union and when he delivered his address, did
he discuss with you or anyone on your staff his concerns about the
yellow cake issue?
DR. RICE: No. In fact, we had a much more extensive discussion of
how to characterize the aluminum tubes, frankly. I mean, that was a
much more extensive discussion, because we had -- we had a real
debate going on about IAEA and the Department of Energy and so forth.
That we discussed in some depth. This we did not.
Q Dr. Rice, when did you all find out that the documents were
forged?
DR. RICE: Sometime in March, I believe. Is that right?
MR. FLEISCHER: The IAEA reported it.
DR. RICE: The IAEA reported it I believe in March. But I will
tell you that, for instance, on Ambassador Wilson's going out to Niger,
I learned of that when I was sitting on whatever TV show it was,
because that mission was not known to anybody in the White House. And
you should ask the Agency at what level it was known in the Agency.
Q When was that TV show, when you learned about it?
DR. RICE: A month ago, about a month ago.
Q Can I ask you about something else?
DR. RICE: Yes. Are you sure you're through with this?
Q Actually, wait a minute. Would it be -- I mean, it would
probably be instructive and useful at some point before we get back to
Washington to have Secretary Powell explain to us his thought process.
MR. FLEISCHER: But he did explain. He didn't think --
Q He didn't go into it -- we'd like to know why this was left
out, whether it was the subject of internal debate with him and his
people, that kind of thing.
MR. FLEISCHER: We can't hear you. Everybody is speaking at one
time.
Q I'd like to know whether it was a subject -- you know, any
kind of ticktock about thoughts and discussions he had about this. We
know he didn't discuss it with you. That's fine, but any of his own
deliberations, why he left it -- ultimately, why he left it on the
cutting room floor.
MR. FLEISCHER: I will pass that on. But look at the transcript
last night, because he was asked that last night.
Q What you're saying is, even at the time of the State of the
Union speech, the INR, the Secretary of State's intelligence arm, had
reservations about the underlying intelligence for --
DR. RICE: As I explained -- well, the INR footnote says, we -- I
should actually -- we're dubious about some of these reports about
yellow cake. It's also not very specific, by the way. But what I'm
saying to you is that there is a process called the National
Intelligence Estimate that takes into account that some agencies may
have reservations. And that's why it appears in the way that it does.
It appears as a judgment and then it appears -- or as information
passed. In this case, it is --
Q Rather like a court of third opinion in the dissenting
view.
Q -- seven days later, why didn't Powell's -- Secretary
Powell's presentation, you say, well, he relied upon the INR --
DR. RICE: No, I didn't say that. I said, the Secretary --
Q -- you said --
DR. RICE: No, I said, it is not surprising to me, given that the
Secretary had -- that it was his agency that had some reservations.
I'm sure he talks to his people.
Q But weren't they speaking with -- I mean, wasn't the
administration speaking with one voice --
DR. RICE: And there were things that got left out of this talk.
Q No, but you're saying that they got left out for time, but
he made it clear that it was left out because it was a --
DR. RICE: David, don't put words in my mouth. I said that there
were several -- first of all, things got left out because they didn't
make the presentation. Secondly, the Secretary chose to leave out some
things and to caveat some things that the NIE did not caveat. The NIE
is -- on the aluminum tubes, the judgment is they're for particular
things. The Secretary says, there's a debate about this. But going
back to the President's speech, which is really the issue here, the
President of the United States went up to give the State of the Union
on the basis of information that was in his National Intelligence
Estimate and that everybody thought to be true. The fact of the matter
is, it may well still be true. But having very high standards for what
we put in a presidential speech, knowing now that at least one of the
documents underlying this story was a forgery, we wouldn't have put it
in the President's speech. It doesn't mean we disagree with the
British that it may well still be true. The British may well be right
about that. There are other African countries that are cited, which is
one reason that the President's speech refers to Africa, not simply to
Niger.
So the process is an NIE that is the basis of this, and then if the
Agency had reservations about information that was in the NIE, then the
DCI -- and I think he will tell you that if he had reservations, he did
not make those known to the President, to the Vice President, or to me
-- if he had reservations.
Q If you take into account the issue that we've just spent
the last half an hour --
(end side one of tape; begin side two, same Q in progress)
Q -- (in progress) -- the fact that it hasn't been found yet,
the fact that Saddam Hussein is still at large, the daily attacks
against American troops, how would you classify the overall situation?
And do you think there's a problem that ordinary Americans might think,
why did we go down this route at all?
DR. RICE: I don't think there is a problem in that way, because
the President told the American people early on that when we went to
war to deal with the menace that was the Saddam Hussein regime, and
that had defied the world on weapons of mass destruction for more than
a decade, and that was known to have had unaccounted for stockpiles of
weapons of mass destruction -- U.N. reporting, not our own -- a menace
that President Clinton had tried to deal with, with actual military
force in 1998, he told the American people, I'm doing this because I
believe it's in the best security interest of the United States. He
also said it's going to be hard, but we're staying there until there is
a stable postwar Iraq. We have a commitment to the region for a stable
postwar Iraq; we have a commitment to the Iraqi people, having helped
them to throw off this bloody tyrant; we have a commitment to the
entire region, which is very much now a region of great trouble and
turmoil, leading directly to the attacks on the United
States in September of 2001. The President would stand up and say
that today, just as he said it in January, February and March of last
year.
Everybody has known that this was going to be hard, but we
shouldn't lose track of what has been accomplished. Saddam Hussein is
out of power. Yes, some of his henchmen who benefited from the terror
of that regime against the Iraqi people are still terrorizing the Iraqi
people. And it should be notable to everybody that they're going after
successes of the coalition, so -- the power grid. We rebuild the power
grid; they try to go after the power grid. Oil, which we are getting
back up and running -- the Iraqis are getting back up and running --
for the benefit of the Iraqi people; they want to go after that. The
Iraqis who want to participate in building their own future, like the
Iraqi police, those are the people that these thugs are targeting, just
like they targeted the Iraqi people for the two-and-a-half decades of
Saddam Hussein's regime.
Now, the Iraqi people are getting control of their own future. I
think that the -- when the leadership council is in place and you have
Iraqi governance structures in place, that it will be even clearer to
the world that this is not targeted against the coalition, this is
targeted directly against the Iraqi people. And it's maybe not
surprising given the way that these thugs behaved against their own
people was for two decades, the last three decades.
Q Can I ask one more on Africa? As an African American, what
has it meant to you to see Africa, to be here with this President?
What are your impressions of what you're learning?
DR. RICE: I have found this an incredibly moving trip in a lot of
ways. Goree Island was extraordinary to me. The incongruity of it --
it's such a beautiful place and that these horrors could have happened
at this beautiful place, and you can almost imagine these stolen people
suddenly arriving on the shore of this absolutely beautiful place and
being put in these horrible cells where large numbers of them would
die. And then I think the Gate of No Return I still have a lump in my
throat for, thinking which one of my ancestors might have actually gone
through that gate on their way to the United States.
But I thought that the President said something that really struck
me as an African American, and it's funny, it's always struck me as an
African American, which is that the remarkable thing is that those
horrors and the horrors that they experienced on the way to the United
States, and the horrors they experienced once they got to the United
States didn't break the spirit of these people, that somehow they
managed to, in many cases, find faith to find somehow a sense of
community.
You know, jumping the broom is still an African American tradition
at marriage -- not that I have done that yet -- (laughter) -- but, you
know, it's still considered a tradition. It comes out of slavery, and
it was in some ways a defiant act because people weren't really
supposed to marry. And you just see the tremendous spirit and
toughness of these people. And it just makes me extremely proud to be
descendant from those people.
Q One more brief one, please? Guantanamo Bay, a big issue
that's come up at the moment in Britain is relations between U.S. and
U.K. over the British citizens held in Guantanamo Bay. The British
government wants reassurances, especially members in the ruling party
want reassurances that they will not be facing the death penalty. Can
you tell us anything about negotiations?
DR. RICE: This is being worked out between the U.S. government and
the British government. Britain is a friend, and so we're going to be
open and transparent with Britain about what's going on here. I think
we have to remember, these people were picked up for terrorism and so
that has to be kept in mind. But both the treatment of them, which is
in accordance with the standards of the Geneva Convention, and also the
very careful process that the military commission sets up to try to
deal with, and balance the concerns of national security with due
process, those are being discussed with the British government and I'm
sure will be fine.
MR. FLEISCHER: Thank you, everybody.
END 1:07 P.M. (Local)
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