Entebbe: US President George W Bush on July 11 said intelligence services cleared his State of the Union speech, which included a now-discredited allegation that Iraq was seeking to buy nuclear material from Africa.

The issue arose a day after senior US officials said that before and after Bush's January 28 speech, American intelligence officials expressed doubts about a British intelligence report that the President cited to back up his allegations.

"I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services, Bush said in Uganda, on the fourth day of an African tour. He did not explain how the erroneous material ended up in his address but insisted that the war in Iraq was justified, and that the world was now a safer place."

Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, also specifically pointed to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and said it had vetted the speech, clearing it "in its entirety".

If CIA Director George Tenet had any misgivings about that sentence in the President's speech, "he did not make them known" to Bush or his staff, she said.

The American doubts were relayed to British officials before they made them public, and that word was passed to people at several agencies of the US government before Bush gave that nationally broadcast speech. The White House this week admitted the charge about Iraq seeking uranium should not have appeared in his speech.

The CIA raised only one objection to the sentence involving an allegation that Iraq was trying to obtain yellow cake uranium, she said. The yellow cake is a slightly processed form of uranium ore, the colour and consistency of yellow corn meal.