WASHINGTON, Oct 2 (AFP) - National security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sunday strongly denied a report that the George W. Bush administration had been told that aluminum tubes in Iraq before the war were likely for conventional weapons -- not for a nuclear weapons program, as the White House long had asserted.
"That is not accurate," Rice told NBC television's "Today Show" program about a report appearing in Sunday's New York Times, which reported that the Bush administration was made aware as early as 2001 that the aluminum tubes used as critical evidence to justify an invasion of Iraq were probably for intended for small artillery rockets.
In the months after the September 11 attacks, as the administration built a case for confronting Iraq, Rice and other senior officials asserted that the tubes were evidence of a nuclear program, despite expert opinion to the contrary, the Times wrote.
"She was aware of the differences of opinion," newspaper quotes a senior administration official saying about Rice.
But Rice denied that Sunday.
"At that time we understood there were some debates within the intelligence community. I later learned that the Energy Department believed that these tubes might be for something else," she said.
"But in fact, the intelligence community assessment -- the judgment of the intelligence community as a whole as well as the very strong view of the director of central intelligence -- was that these tube were most likely for use in nuclear weapons," she said.