Courtesy of Global Security, this is a link to the text of a statement issued by Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet last July. Below are some excerpts.
There was fragmentary intelligence gathered in late 2001 and early 2002 on the allegations of Saddam's efforts to obtain additional raw uranium from Africa, beyond the 550 metric tons already in Iraq.
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[...]in the fall of 2002, our British colleagues told us they were planning to publish an unclassified dossier that mentioned reports of Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium in Africa. Because we viewed the reporting on such acquisition attempts to be inconclusive, we expressed reservations about its inclusion but our colleagues said they were confident in their reports and left it in their document.
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In October [2002], the Intelligence Community (IC) produced a classified, 90 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's WMD programs. There is a lengthy section in which most agencies of the Intelligence Community judged that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Let me emphasize, the NIE's Key Judgments cited six reasons for this assessment; the African uranium issue was not one of them.
This is the statement in which Tenet said that the inclusion of the infamous "sixteen words" in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address regarding Great Britain's intelligence that Iraq had, in fact, attempted to purchase uranium from Niger, was a mistake. But it was only a mistake because it did not meet the CIA's standard of certainty, not because it was factually untrue to say that the British had evidence of such Iraqi activity.
We now know that the British were right. We now know that what the President said could have been said even more strongly. And we also know that the people who are trying to defend Joe Wilson are defending a liar with an axe to grind.
Iraq was trying to keep its nuclear weapons program alive. Remember that when you think it was a mistake for us to have invaded Iraq and removed Saddam.