"It's a recognition that we were provided faulty information," said Daschle

WASHINGTON, July 9 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The Bush administration suffered a new blow to its case for Iraq invasion when the White House formally admitted President George W. Bush overstated ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's alleged efforts to obtain uranium for nuclear arms.

The Bush administration backed away from assertions that Saddam tried to purchase "yellow cake" uranium from Africa to kick-start Iraq's idled nuclear weapons program. Bush included the allegation in his State of the Union speech in January, but the White House now said it regretted having done so, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported Wednesday, July 9.

"It's a recognition that we were provided faulty information," said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle.

"And I think it's all the more reason why a full investigation of all of the facts surrounding this situation be undertaken -- the sooner the better."

Opposition Democrats pounced on what one called an example of the president's use of "unproven, untested and untrue reports" portraying Iraq as an imminent threat to the United States before the March 20 invasion.

Limited reviews of past intelligence are currently underway in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but Democrats have said a broader bipartisan investigation is needed to determine whether the White House manipulated prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons program -- a move Republicans have blocked so far.

"Bipartisan investigations of this kind have been done in the past, to great success. Now is the time to do one in this case," Daschle said.

"It ought to be the subject of careful scrutiny ... with regard to what it was we knew, what actions were taken, what statements were correct and which ones were incorrect. The sooner we can acquire that information, the better for the country," the South Dakota democrat added.

Michigan Senator Carl Levin, top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said the White House admission raised more questions than they answered.

"The reported White House statements only reinforce the importance of an inquiry into why the information about the bogus uranium sales didn't reach the policymakers during 2002 and why, as late as the president's State of the Union address in January 2003, our policymakers were still using information which the intelligence community knew was almost certainly false," he said.

Levin, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently initiated his own investigation into U.S. intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction program, after the committee's chairman, Republican Senator John Warner, declined to initiate a probe.

A former U.S. ambassador who investigated reports about alleged sales of processed uranium by Niger to Iraq has concluded Sunday, July 6, the government twisted intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

'Judicial Inquiry'

Meanwhile, the British government faced Wednesday fresh calls for a judicial inquiry following further twists in its bitter row with the BBC over the handling of secret intelligence in an Iraqi weapons dossier.

Rodric Braithwaite, who was foreign affairs advisor to former prime minister John Major, told The Financial Times newspaper that a judicial inquiry should be launched to address the continued skepticism about the government's justification for going to war.

If within eight months or so it was shown that the case for war had been based on a non-existent threat it would "leave the government looking very tattered," said Braithwaite, a former head of parliament's Joint Intelligence Committee.

The Ministry of Defense (MoD) said Tuesday, July 8, that one of its officials had come forward as the possible source of BBC claims that a dossier on Iraqi weapons had been "sexed up" on the orders of Downing Street.

The MoD said that the unnamed official had met the BBC's reporter, Andrew Gilligan, a week before he broadcast his original report.

But the official denied laying the responsibility at the door of Blair's communications chief Alastair Campbell who, Gilligan said, had been blamed by his source for the story.

The BBC reported that Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon had offered to disclose the identity of the official to the corporation.

However, it was rejected by Gavyn Davies, chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, who said it was an attempt to force it to reveal its sources which would break a "cardinal" journalistic principle

The BBC cast doubt on whether the official was actually Gilligan's source, saying that the description of the man given by the MoD did not match the source "in some important ways".

The disclosure came the day after parliament's foreign affairs committee produced a much-awaited report after examining the two dossiers published by the British government in the run-up to war.

The foreign affairs committee's report concluded that the 45-minute claim "did not warrant the prominence given to it in the dossier, because it was based on intelligence from a single, uncorroborated source."