US President George W Bush has vowed to find Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq on a day when new claims that evidence against Saddam Hussein's regime was doctored to provide a pretext for war emerged.
The Washington Postreports today that US vice president paid "multiple" visits to the CIA creating an environment in which some analysts felt pressured to make assessments of Iraq data fit administration's policy objectives.
The newspaper reports an unnamed senior CIA official saying visits by Mr Cheney and his chief of staff over the past year to question the analysts "sent signals, intended or otherwise that a certain output was desired from here".
The report cited intelligence officials saying that visits to CIA headquarters by a vice president are unusual.
The disclosure comes amid growing concern that the administration exaggerated - either deliberately or due to faulty intelligence - the threat posed by Iraq's weapons.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is also under severe pressure over the issue of "doctoring" evidence of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Although he managed to avert a full judicial inquiry into the growing claims, he was forced to announce a parliamentary investigation.
The dispute in Britain exploded after a report in the Guardian newspaper said US Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had doubts about the quality of the intelligence they had received.
The BBC later cited an anonymous intelligence source saying Mr Blair's office pressed intelligence services to include a claim that Iraq's weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes.
The assertion by the both British and US governments that Iraq possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and had a program to develop nuclear weapons was the main justification for the war but no such weapon has been found since President Saddam Hussein was toppled.
At the Qatari base from where the coalition ran the war on Iraq, Mr Bush suggested Saddam had hidden the weapons. "He's got a big country in which to hide 'em. Well, we'll look. We'll reveal the truth," said Mr Bush.
"No terrorist network will gain Weapons of Mass Destruction from the Iraqi regime because the Iraqi regime is no more."
The Washington Post'sreport said that former and current intelligence officials felt a continual pressure from Mr Cheney, Deputy Defence Secretary Mr Paul Wolfowitz and, to a lesser extent, CIA director Mr George Tenet, to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that invading Iraq was urgent.
Mr Cheney refused to comment.
The newspaper quoted senior administration sources as saying that the visits allowed Mr Cheney and his chief of staff, Mr Lewis Libby, to have direct exchanges with analysts rather than ask questions of their daily briefers.
A team of seven inspectors from the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency have arrived in Kuwait en route to Iraq to conduct a limited inquiry into reports of looting at Iraq's main nuclear facility.
The International Atomic Energy Agency's task will be to determine how much nuclear material was looted from a storage site near the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center after the war.
But the United States, as the occupying power in Iraq, has limited their mission to counting missing containers of radioactive material and repackaging spilled material. They will not measure environmental contamination or look into reports of radiation sickness among nearby residents.
AFP &