Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White
House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would
be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally
warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the
administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of
classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen
J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he
later made in his 2003 State of the Union Address -- that Iraq was
procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be
true, according to government records and interviews.

Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a
classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically
written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies
judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort,"
the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy
Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are
intended for conventional weapons." ...

The White House was largely successful in defusing the Niger controversy
because there was no evidence that Bush was aware that his claims about the
uranium were based on faulty intelligence. Then-CIA Director George Tenet
swiftly and publicly took the blame for the entire episode, saying that he and
the CIA were at fault for not warning Bush and his aides that the information
might be untrue.

But Hadley and other administration officials realized that it would be
much more difficult to shield Bush from criticism for his statements regarding
the aluminum tubes, for several reasons.
For one, Hadley's review concluded that Bush had been directly and repeatedly apprised of the deep rift within the intelligence community over whether Iraq wanted the high-strength aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program or for conventional weapons.
For another, the president and others in the administration had cited the aluminum tubes as the most compelling evidence that Saddam was determined to build a nuclear weapon -- even more than the allegations that he was attempting to purchase uranium.

And finally, full disclosure of the internal dissent over the importance of
the tubes would have almost certainly raised broader questions about the
administration's conduct in the months leading up to war.

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior
government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the
damage-control effort. [Colin Powell? - ed] "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes." A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: "This was about getting past the election."

Most troublesome to those leading the damage-control effort was documentary
evidence -- albeit in highly classified government records that they might be
able to keep secret -- that the president had been advised that many in the
intelligence community believed that the tubes were meant for conventional
weapons.

The one-page documents known as the "President's Summary" are distilled
from the much lengthier National Intelligence Estimates, which combine the
analysis of as many as six intelligence agencies regarding major national
security issues. Bush's knowledge of the State and Energy departments' dissent
over the tubes was disclosed in a March 4, 2006, National Journal story -- more than three years after the intelligence assessment was provided to the president, and some 16 months after the 2004 presidential election.

The President's Summary was only one of several high-level warnings
given to Bush and other senior administration officials that serious doubts
existed about the intended use of the tubes, according to government records and
interviews with former and current officials.

In mid-September 2002, two weeks before Bush received the October 2002
President's Summary, Tenet informed him that both State and Energy had doubts
about the aluminum tubes and that even some within the CIA weren't certain that
the tubes were meant for nuclear weapons, according to government records and
interviews with two former senior officials.

Three days later, on July 11, while on a visit to Africa, Bush and his top
aides intensified their efforts to counter the damage done by Wilson's Niger
allegations.

Aboard Air Force One, en route to Entebbe, Uganda,
then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice gave a background briefing for
reporters. A reporter pointed out that when Secretary Powell had addressed the
United Nations on February 5, 2003, he -- unlike others in the Bush
administration -- had noted that some in the U.S. government did not believe
that Iraq's procurement of high-strength aluminum tubes was for nuclear weapons.
Responding, Rice said: "I'm saying that when we put [Powell's speech]
together ... the secretary decided that he would caveat the aluminum tubes,
which he did.... The secretary also has an intelligence arm that happened to
hold that view." Rice added, "Now, if there were any doubts about the underlying
intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president,
to the vice president, or me."

In fact, contrary to Rice's statement, the president was indeed
informed of such doubts when he received the October 2002 President's Summary of the NIE. Both Cheney and Rice also got copies of the summary, as well as a
number of other intelligence reports about the State and Energy departments'
doubts that the tubes were meant for a nuclear weapons program.

On July 18, the Bush administration declassified a relatively small portion
of the NIE and held a press briefing to discuss it, in a further effort to show
that the president had used the Niger information only because the intelligence
community had vouched for it. Reporters noted that an "alternate view" box in
the NIE stated that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research
(known as INR) believed that claims of Iraqi purchases of uranium from Africa
were "highly dubious" and that State and DOE also believed that the aluminum
tubes were "most likely for the production of artillery shells."

But White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett suggested that both
the president and Rice had been unaware of this information: "They did not read
footnotes in a 90-page document." Later, addressing the same issue, Bartlett
said, "The president of the United States is not a fact-checker."

Because the Bush administration was able to control what information would
remain classified, however, reporters did not know that Bush had received the
President's Summary that informed him that both State's INR and the Energy
Department doubted that the aluminum tubes were to be used for a nuclear-related
purpose.

(Ironically, at one point, before he had reviewed the one-page summary,
Hadley considered declassifying it because it said nothing about the Niger
intelligence information being untrue. However, after reviewing the summary and
realizing that it would have disclosed presidential knowledge that INR and DOE
had doubts about the tubes, senior Bush administration officials became
preoccupied with ensuring that the text of the document remained classified,
according to an account provided by an administration official.)