Hadley, in a rare on-the-record session with reporters, said that he had received two memos from the CIA and a phone call from agency Director George Tenet last October raising objections to an allegation that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium ore from Africa to use in building nuclear weapons.
As a result, Hadley said the offending passage was excised from a speech on Iraq the president gave in Cincinnati last Oct. 7. But Hadley suggested that details from the memos and phone call had slipped from his attention as the State of the Union was being put together.
"The high standards the president set were not met," Hadley said. He said he apologized to the president on Monday.
Tenet previously issued a statement saying that he should have raised objections to the Iraq-Africa-uranium sentence when the CIA reviewed an advance copy of the president's State of the Union message.
Hadley is the top aide to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
The controversial passage citing a British intelligence report "should have been taken out of the State of the Union," Hadley said. He said he was taking responsibility on behalf of the White House staff just as Tenet had done for the CIA.
"There were a number of people who could have raised a hand" to have the passage removed from the draft of Bush's Jan. 28 address, Hadley said. "And no one raised a hand."
"The process failed," said White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett.
Still, Bartlett said that Bush, while perturbed by the developments, "has full confidence in his national security adviser, his deputy national security adviser and the director of central intelligence."
The disclosure came as the administration went into full damage-control mode, releasing a variety of information and reaching out to its Republican allies in Congress in an effort to counter criticism of Bush's Iraq policy and his use of discredited intelligence to advance the case for toppling Saddam Hussein.
With Bush's job approval ratings slipping and U.S. casualties in Iraq continuing to climb, the White House sought to move the debate over the Iraq war away from the flap over Bush's 16-word assertion that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa.