“In a July 11 [2003] briefing with the traveling press pool aboard Air Force One on the way to Uganda, [National Security Advisor] Condoleezza Rice was peppered with questions–forty in all–about the infamous ‘sixteen words [in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address, which claimed Iraq sought uranium from Niger].’ …Was it true, Rice was asked, that the CIA had expressed doubts about the Niger claim to the White House well before the State of the Union? ‘The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety,’ Rice replied. ‘If the CIA, the director of Central Intelligence [George Tenet], 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.’ (Rice would find out several days later that the National Security Council, which she oversaw, bore primary responsibility for the error.)”
– Scott McClellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, Pages 171-172