"This is a situation where a number of people had an opportunity to avoid the problem. And those opportunities were not taken advantage of," deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley said.

"And what we needed to make clear today is that based on what we now know, we had opportunities here to avoid this problem. We didn't take them."

Bush has drawn fire over a line in his January State of the Union address to the nation alleging that the British had learned Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa. White House aides have publicly said he should not have said it.

Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet earlier this month publicly accepted the blame for leaving the line in the speech even though his agency had repudiated it.

But he later said the White House pushed for its inclusion, according to one lawmaker who heard his closed-door testimony last week.

Hadley disclosed that the White House deleted a reference to Saddam's efforts to get uranium from an October speech by Bush after receiving two CIA memoranda casting doubt on the assertion.

"Given the October 5 and 6 CIA memorandum, and my telephone conversation with ... Tenet at roughly the some time, I should have recalled at the time of the State of the Union speech that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue," Hadley said.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair continues to insist the information is genuine and not based on documents later determined to have been forged. But Democrats have seized on the mistake, claiming it is evidence the White House exaggerated and manipulated evidence to push the nation into war.

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