Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in separate appearances on Sunday television talk programs that the disputed sentence in Mr. Bush's January speech was carefully hedged, enough that it could still be considered accurate today.

While continuing to acknowledge, as the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency did last week, that the phrase should not have been uttered, they emphasized today that the British had indeed, as Mr. Bush said, reported Iraq's interest in acquiring African uranium.

In his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, Mr. Bush contended that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop a nuclear bomb. Among elements he cited to make his case was a statement that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Ms. Rice, in an appearance on "Fox News Sunday," said that "the statement that he made was indeed accurate. The British government did say that." 

And Mr. Rumsfeld said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" that "it turns out that it's technically correct what the president said, that the U.K. does — did say that — and still says that. They haven't changed their mind, the United Kingdom intelligence people."

On the ABC News program "This Week," Mr. Rumsfeld added that "it didn't rise to the standard of a presidential speech, but it's not known, for example, that it was inaccurate. In fact, people think it was technically accurate."

The legalistic defense of the phrasing seemed to signal a shift in the White House's strategy in dealing with the political fallout over Mr. Bush's public use of evidence that was based in part on fabricated documents and in part on uncorroborated reports from abroad.

It came after a week in which the White House first repudiated the statement and then blamed the Central Intelligence Agency for allowing Mr. Bush to make it. On Friday, George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence, accepted responsibility, saying "these 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president." 

But the bout of finger-pointing between the White House and the agency concerning the African uranium only served to intensify the criticism of the administration for its handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq. Rather than quelling the controversy, the White House stoked it through official statements, providing an opening for Democratic leaders to attack the administration's handling of the intelligence. So Sunday's effort by Ms. Rice and Mr. Rumsfeld appeared to be a response by the White House to turn down the flame on a hot story that the White House itself had helped ignite just days earlier.

Some White House officials suggested that the public was less interested in the story's ins and outs than the news media and the political opposition, and that this was why the administration chose this approach. 

In the months before the invasion of Iraq, President Bush and his advisers frequently cited classified intelligence reports that they said provided proof that Iraq was developing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and had links to Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. Mr. Bush and his advisers said the threat posed by Iraq's development of those weapons and the possibility that Mr. Hussein might share them with terrorists made it necessary to overthrow the Iraqi government. 

Since American forces occupied the country, however, they have not discovered conclusive evidence of the existence of such weapons in Iraq's possession, and have also failed to discover conclusive proof that Iraq had forged a terrorist alliance with Al Qaeda. 

The failure to find unconventional weapons has led to intense scrutiny of the administration's approach before the war. A group of retired C.I.A. officers has conducted an internal review at the agency of the prewar intelligence reports on Iraq, and Congress has also begun to investigate the handling of the evidence. 

In his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, Mr. Bush cited several reports in arguing that Mr. Hussein was trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

"The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990's that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon, and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb," Mr. Bush stated. "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide."

Since the speech, the evidence concerning both the uranium purchases and the aluminum tubes has come into question. In March, the I.A.E.A. reported that documents that formed the basis for reports that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger were forgeries, though the C.I.A. had doubts about the claims of the African uranium shipments long before that. Intelligence officials say the C.I.A. told British officials last fall that they doubted the evidence on the matter, which London was including in a publicly released white paper. 

And in the days before Mr. Bush's address, government officials say, a proliferation expert from the C.I.A. discussed the evidence on Niger with a proliferation expert from the National Security Council at the White House. The two men now have different recollections of their conversations on the matter, government officials say. Still, the result was that the phrase in the speech did not refer specifically to Niger, but rather more generally to African uranium. Now, Ms. Rice and other American officials contend that other information about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium from African countries has not been discredited, so that Mr. Bush's statement should be considered accurate. 

On Sunday, Ms. Rice sought to play down the significance of the reference in the speech and at the same time defend its use.

"It is ludicrous to suggest that the president of the United States went to war on the question of whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa," Ms. Rice said on Fox. "This was part of a very broad case that the president laid out in the State of the Union and other places."

But she added that "not only was the statement accurate, there were statements of this kind in the National Intelligence Estimate. And the British themselves stand by that statement to this very day."