Washington ? A former U.S. diplomat who investigated reports of Iraq buying uranium in Africa Tuesday blasted the Bush administration’s admission that it used faulty intelligence despite his warnings.

Joseph Wilson, who revealed Sunday that last year he had been sent on a mission to Niger by the CIA, said Tuesday in an interview that “with 200 Americans dead (in Iraq) and 150,000 in danger and billions of dollars spent, it is not enough to say, Gilda Radner-like, ‘Never mind.”‘

The administration’s statement late Monday that “knowing what we know now” the allegation should not have appeared in President Bush’s State of the Union address undercut one of the administration’s rationale for going to war with Iraq and drew calls for yet another intelligence investigation from a key Senate Democrat.

“The question has always been how did it get into the president’s speech,” said Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. “How was it disseminated when it was debunked by the intelligence community? Was there a judgment made that we’re going to use it anyway?”

Rockefeller said he had asked for an investigation by the inspectors general of the CIA and the State Department.

Rockefeller said it was “very clear to me” that the information about Iraq buying uranium from Africa “was discredited a long time ago,” and he said the White House should have retracted its claim sooner. “The whole question of how that got in that speech has to be followed through,” Rockefeller added.

Congressional Republicans suggested such criticism was politically driven, and they insisted that the administration’s justification for conducting a war in Iraq was sound.

“It’s very easy to pick one little flaw here and one little flaw there,” said Tom DeLay, R-Texas, the House majority leader. “The overall reason we went into Iraq is sound and morally sound. And it’s not just because somebody forged or made a mistake on whether Saddam Hussein was looking for nuclear material from Niger or wherever.”

But Democrats made it clear they would not relent.

Wilson, a former U.S. charge d’affairs in Baghdad and National Security Council staffer, said the administration knew before, not after, the president’s speech in January that the allegations were likely false because he had reported this in March 2002 to the State Department and the CIA.

A senior intelligence official told Newsday last month that the information was widely disseminated throughout the administration to “all of God’s children.”

After the president’s speech, the International Atomic Energy Agency determined that the uranium allegation was based on documents purchased by Italian intelligence that were crude forgeries.

With no chemical or biological weapons having yet been found in Iraq, the admission of the bogus uranium allegation further undercut the administration’s basis for war at a time when U.S. soldiers are dying in Iraq at the rate of almost one a day. Bush also claimed in his speech that Iraq had purchased special aluminum tubes for making weapons grade uranium, a charge that already had been disputed by the United Nations and his own Department of Energy.

Bush, in Africa Tuesday, did not comment on the controversy.

One administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that without the specific document on which the British report was based, “the whole case looks wobbly.”

But he added with emphasis, when other undisclosed reports on which the administration has relied are taken into consideration, “it looks pretty damn solid.”

Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said, “Obviously, when you use foreign intelligence, you — we don’t have necessarily as much confidence or as much reliability as you do your own. The administration, I think, has been very forthright. I think that’s the real issue.”

But one former diplomat in the Middle East said that the discrediting of the stated reasons for invading Iraq leaves the dangerous perception that the Bush administration had a “hidden agenda — the redrawing of the political map of the Middle East.”