THE US: With questions mounting about the way the Bush administration used intelligence reports on banned weapons to justify war against Iraq, the Pentagon has launched a campaign to counter allegations that it manipulated US intelligence findings.
At the same time, a top-secret US intelligence report last autumn is at the centre of an internal CIA review to determine whether it miscalculated in its assessment of the threat to the United States from Saddam Hussein, according to the New York Times.
In seeking to persuade the United Nations to back an invasion of Iraq, the US claimed that the regime had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear programme. No such weapons have been found since the fall of Baghdad two months ago.
The Pentagon policy chief, Mr Douglas Feith, told reporters yesterday he wanted to "help lay to rest some stories that have been circulating about the Defence Department that are not true and are beginning to achieve the status of urban legends".
He denied that Pentagon officials put pressure on the CIA or any other US intelligence agency to conform findings to the statements by President Bush and other top officials that Iraq had hidden huge stocks of unconventional weapons and was poised to use them and had dangerous links - still unproven - with al-Qaeda.
Some former US intelligence agents have come forward in recent weeks to charge the CIA and the Pentagon in particular of hyping dubious information from unreliable Iraqi sources to justify war.
The key CIA document now under investigation called a "national estimate" was said by intelligence officials to have provided President Bush with his last major overview of the status of Iraq's programme to develop weapons of mass destruction before the start of the war.
The director of the CIA, Mr George Tenet, reportedly has marshalled a small team of retired analysts to assess the accuracy of the intelligence reports produced before the war, particularly those issued by a separate hawkish intelligence unit set up inside the Pentagon.
In Congress, both Senate and House committees are preparing to investigate the intelligence used to justify the Bush administration's categorical statements about the presence of banned weapons programmes and are to receive CIA documents used to prepare the national estimate.
The failure to find Iraq's weapons is beginning to have a serious political impact in Washington, where regime change was official congressional policy long before the weapons issue became the Bush administration's main causus belli.
The issue has been taken up by the US media which has become increasingly sceptical about pre- war claims and the Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, has been forced to address the issue in encounters with the press abroad.
- A team of seven inspectors from the UN nuclear watchdog agency has left for Iraq to conduct a limited probe into reports of looting at Iraq's main nuclear facility. The International Atomic Energy Agency's task will be to determine how much material was looted from storage near the Tuwaitha nuclear research centre after the war. The US, as the occupying power in Iraq, has limited the mission to counting missing containers of radioactive material and repackaging spilled material.