WASHINGTON, July 6 (IslamOnline.net & news Agencies) - A former U.S. ambassador who investigated a reports about alleged sales of processed uranium by Niger to Iraq has concluded the government twisted intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

"Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," Joseph Wilson said in an op-ed article published in the New York Times on Sunday, July 6.

Wilson, Washington's envoy to Gabon from 1992 to 1995, who served in the U.S. foreign service from 1976 to 1998, said he was asked by the CIA in February 2002 to travel to Niger to investigate a report that it had sold processed uranium to Iraq in the late 1990s, which had been later dismissed by the U.N. nuclear watchdog as based on fraudulent documents.

In February 2002, Wilson was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about the intelligence report.

"While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake - a form of lightly processed ore - by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's."

Arriving in the African country, Wilson said the U.S. ambassador to Niger told him that had already "debunked allegations of uranium sales to Iraq in her reports to Washington.

Following days of meeting with dozens of people - current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business - Wilson concluded that it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq.

"It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place," he said.

Wilson said that Niger's two uranium mines are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests.

"If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency."

"In short, there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired," he said.

"Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in the United States government archives confirming my mission," he said.

"While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure."

Wilson was surprised when, in December 2002, the State Department published a fact sheet mentioning the Niger sale, and in January 2003, President George W. Bush repeated the charges that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa.

"If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why.) If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses," Wilson wrote.