WASHINGTON (AP) – The White House has teamed with GOP congressional leaders in an aggressive damage-control campaign to counter embarrassing questions about prewar intelligence and lapses by President Bush’s national security team.

But the effort is being hampered by an ever-changing White House story – from first blaming the CIA and then the British to new revelations by Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley that contradict earlier statements by his boss, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Two high-ranking officials – Hadley and CIA Director George Tenet – have publicly apologized for not doing more to keep out of Bush’s State of the Union address a discredited British claim that Iraq was trying to obtain raw uranium in Africa.

The president has dodged questions over whether he takes personal responsibility for those words.

So far, no one has resigned over the dispute. But the flap has raised questions over the future roles of Tenet and Hadley, the quality of intelligence provided the president and the relationship between the White House and the CIA.

Bush’s approval ratings have been slumping. Recent surveys show that roughly half of Americans now believe the administration intentionally exaggerated the evidence for going to war.

Bush got a temporary respite from the criticism with the killing of Saddam Hussein’s sons Odai and Qusai, enabling him to give an upbeat progress report on Iraq to reporters in the Rose Garden on Wednesday.

But the controversy over his Iraq-Africa comments are lingering.

At issue is this 16-word sentence in Bush’s Jan. 28 State of the Union speech: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

When it was later disclosed that some of the evidence was based on forged documents, White House officials disavowed any advance knowledge the information was tainted. “No one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery,” Rice told a TV interview on July 8.

A few days later, she told reporters the CIA “cleared the speech in its entirety.” If Tenet, the CIA director, had any misgivings, he never shared them with the White House, she said.

But Hadley, Rice’s top aide, said Tuesday that in fact he received two memos from the CIA and a phone call from Tenet last October warning him that evidence that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium in Africa was not reliable.

One memo was also directed to Rice. “I can’t tell you she read it,” Hadley told reporters. “But in some sense, it doesn’t matter. Memo sent, we’re on notice.”

The White House took the offending passage out of a speech that Bush gave in Cincinnati last Oct. 7. But it somehow found its way into Bush’s address 31/2 months later.

Politically, the controversy has given Democrats a rare opening to challenge the president on foreign policy.

“The buck does not stop with the CIA director, George Tenet, and it does not stop with Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. The buck stops with the president,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

While the White House says one thing, “We’re getting totally different messages from the CIA,” said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. Levin is one of a growing number of Democrats demanding congressional hearings.

The damage-control effort has included confessional sessions like Hadley’s, the release of selected declassified portions of intelligence reports to bolster the administration’s case, outspoken defense of the administration by congressional GOP leaders and an attempt to reframe the war rationale.

Weapons of mass destruction – once a key basis for military action – now are “not of immediate consequence,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz declares.

Bush and his top aides are now focusing on how Iraqis have been liberated, the world made safer.

“America and our partners kept our promise to remove the dictator and the threat he posed not only to the Iraqi people but to the world,” Bush said on Wednesday. Vice President Dick Cheney was expected to make a similar point in a speech on Iraq Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute.

If weapons of mass destruction had been found, if Americans weren’t being killed at a rate of about one a day, the controversy “would be just a sideshow,” suggested Norman Ornstein, a scholar at that institute who focuses on the presidency and Congress.

As it is, “this is sort of getting away from the administration’s control,” Ornstein said.

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EDITOR’S NOTE – Tom Raum has covered national and international affairs for The Associated Press since 1973.

AP-ES-07-23-03 1717EDT