Bush gave the endorsement to Tenet as he met Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo on the final leg of a five-nation African tour.

"I've got confidence in George Tenet, I've got confidence in the men and women who work at the CIA. I look forward to working with them... as we win this war on terror," he told reporters.

Asked if he considered the controversy over the address to be finished, Bush answered: "I do."

Tenet moved Friday to take the heat off Bush over criticism that his January 28 address to the nation contained false claims that the former Iraqi regime sought to buy nuclear materials from Africa.

He took full responsibility for allowing into the speech a report, since discredited, that Iraq had sought to acquire uranium in Niger to make a nuclear bomb.

In an appearance before reporters in Uganda on Friday, Bush had refused to take personal blame for the transgression, saying the CIA had vetted his speech beforehand.

Tenet issued a surprise statement, on Friday echoing the case the White House has been trying to make for a week, as the issue pursued Bush all the way through his African tour.

The sentence in the speech at issue which was eventually discredited was: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Tenet said: "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president."

"The president had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound."

"I am responsible for the approval process in my agency," Tenet said, although he never said outright that he had personally read the president's speech before it was delivered.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer earlier insisted that it was now time for the drama to be closed.

"The president has moved on. And I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on, as well," Fleischer told reporters during a tour of the National Hospital in Abuja.

But a poll in Saturday's Washington post showed Bush's popularity taking a battering.

More than half of those polled said that the number of US troops being killed and injured daily in Iraq was unacceptable, while Bush's personal approval rating fell from 68 percent three weeks ago to 59.

Fully 50 percent of polled Americans said they thought the Bush administration "intentionally exaggerated its evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." Forty-six percent thought it did not.

Bush's national security advisor Condsoleezza Rice on Friday spoke to Tenet by telephone, before telling reporters that the address was sent to him for approval.

"Now I can tell you, if the CIA, the Director of Central Intelligence, had said, 'Take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone, without question," she told reporters on Air Force One.

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