US: The White House sought yesterday to deflect questions about how President Bush used intelligence to make the case for invading Iraq, pointing out that Democrats also believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
White House spokesman Scott McLennan said the Clinton administration also used intelligence to come to the conclusion that Saddam Hussein and his regime were a threat.
"If Democrats want to talk about the threat that Saddam Hussein posed and the intelligence, they might want to start with looking at the previous administration and their own statements that they've made," he said.
Mr McLennan was speaking a day after Democrats surprised the Republican majority by forcing the senate into a closed-door session to highlight claims that the administration abused intelligence.
Democratic senate leader Harry Reid accused Republicans on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee of dragging their feet over a report on the possible misuse of intelligence to make the case for war.
"They have repeatedly chosen to protect the Republican administration rather than get to the bottom of what happened and why," he said.
Using a seldom-invoked procedural move, Democrats cleared the senate chamber and galleries of all outsiders, closed the doors and launched a two-hour discussion of the intelligence report. Republicans were furious and Senate majority leader Bill Frist said he could no longer trust Mr Reid but they agreed that a six-member task force - three members from each party - should review the intelligence committee's work and report to their respective leaders by November 14th.
Under its Republican chairman Pat Roberts, the committee produced a 511-page report last year on flaws in an Iraq intelligence estimate presented to Congress before the Iraq war.
In February last year, the committee agreed unanimously to expand its investigation to look into "whether intelligence was exaggerated or misused" by the administration, but Mr Roberts insisted this second phase of the investigation should not start until after last year's presidential election.
A year later, there is no sign of the report and Democrats claim that the Republican majority on the committee is reluctant to make progress.
Mr Reid said that last week's indictment of Vice-President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, raised new questions about how the administration made the case for war.
The senate shutdown took the White House by surprise and temporarily derailed its strategy of moving the news focus off the Libby indictment and onto its new nominee for the supreme court, conservative judge Samuel Alito.
Mr Libby is scheduled to appear in a Washington court today to enter pleas on charges of perjury, lying to federal investigators and obstruction of justice. - Additional reporting: Guardian service