The White House is releasing intelligence documents used in making the determination whether Iraq posed a threat before the war.

The National Intelligence Estimate is a US intelligence summary based on the work of six agencies.

The summary said that “most agencies believe that Saddam’s personal interest in and Iraq’s aggressive attempts” to obtain nuclear weapons materials “provide compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort for Baghdad’s nuclear weapons programme”.

The report cites “high confidence” within the intelligence community that “Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material”.

However, under a category of “moderate confidence,” the document states that “Iraq does not yet have a nuclear weapon or sufficient material to make one but is likely to have a weapon by 2007 to 2009″.

Mr Bush’s State of the Union address in January included a British Government claim that Iraq tried to get uranium from the West African state of Niger.

The CIA had voiced doubts about the intelligence long before the speech – and had cut it from an earlier presidential address – as did the State Department.

A senior official, who requested that a briefing of White House reporters be put on the record while protecting his anonymity, has commented on the development of the African uranium claim.

The senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, offered the most detailed account yet of how the African uranium claim made it into the January speech. The official contradicted Democratic charges that the White House had pressed to include the claim over CIA opposition and denied that the speech was rewritten to meet CIA complaints that an earlier draft was inaccurate.

The official said Bush speechwriters looking for concrete examples of Hussein’s illicit weapons programs had latched onto the uranium claim because it was contained in the classified National Intelligence Estimate, as well as a public British document.

The official said the speechwriters initially had drafted a series of accusations about Iraqi weapons programs, including the African uranium charge, in the form of flat assertions. They later decided for stylistic reasons to attribute each accusation to a specific source; in the case of the uranium charge, they decided to attribute it to the British document because it was a public document, the official said. At no point did the draft ever include a reference to a specific African country, according to the official.

The proposed change was passed by Robert Joseph, an official with the White House National Security Council, to a CIA proliferations expert, Alan Foley, for review, the administration official said. Foley approved the change without any “protracted negotiation” or “a sharing of various language,” said the official, who said his statement was based on Joseph’s recollection of the conversation.

The eight-page excerpt – out of a reported 90 pages of intelligence documents – indicates various threat assessments:

The material also reports a widely held belief among U.S. agencies that Saddam was attempting to acquire materials that could be used in building atomic bombs, including centrifuge parts, magnets and “high-speed balancing machines.”

The document cites “high confidence” within the intelligence community that “Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.”

Under the category of “moderate confidence,” the report states that “Iraq does not yet have a nuclear weapon or sufficient material to make one but is likely to have a weapon by 2007 to 2009.”

It also expresses “low confidence” that Saddam would engage in attacks on the U.S. homeland or “in desperation” share chemical and biological weapons with al-Qaida terrorists.

Meanwhile, I maintain 100% confidence that Saddam was a sick, twisted bastard and that Iraq is better off without him. Anyone want to disprove that?