Briefing the reporters in Pretoria, the Secretary of State said, "At the time of the president's State of the Union, a judgment was made that was an appropriate statement for the president to make."

"There was no attempt on the part of the president or anyone else in the administration to mislead or to deceive the American people," the South African Press Association reported.

Since this week, the White House officials began to acknowledge that the allegation made by Bush in his State of the Union address in January, stating that Baghdad had sought "significant quantities of uranium from Africa," may be inadequate.

This caused a lot of criticism. Bush himself had to defend the US government's policy on Iraq.

On Wednesday during a press conference, Bush said, "There's no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein's regime was a threat to world peace; there is no doubt that I have done the right thing and ...the facts will show the world the truth."

"There's going to be, you know, a lot of attempts to try to rewrite history," Bush added.

But when a journalist raised the intelligence information about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium from Africa, Bush did not answer the question directly. Instead, he defended his decision to go to war based on a larger body of information.

He said from 1991, the United States has got the information about Saddam Hussein's intention to develop massive destruction weapons.

The Bush administration used purported Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a major justification for the war, and the failure to find such weapons so far has generated intense criticism in international community.

(Xinhua News Agency July 11, 2003)