Iraq's armed forces and the security organisations that supported Saddam Hussein's regime have been dissolved, it was announced today.

L Paul Bremer, the top official in the interim administration that is running the country, said the Iraqi Ministry of Defence, the Republican Guard and "other specified security institutions which constituted and supported the most repressive activities of Saddam Hussein's regime", have been disbanded. . . .

Today's order also ends conscription, turns the property of the dissolved entities over to the new administration and dismissed all employees of the armed forces, Republican Guard and the defence ministry.

It also abolishes the information ministry, which tightly controlled Iraq's media and the work of foreign journalists.

The announcement follows the administration's decree on May 16 abolishing Saddam's Ba'ath party and ordering the dismissal of party officials from the civil service. . . .

The move follows demonstrations in Baghdad on Sunday when former noncommissioned officers and officers from the three services, demanded back pay and other benefits owed to them since the collapse of Saddam's regime on April 9.

The taxes I pay to the federal government, including the payroll tax that is paid for me by my employer, Berkshire Hathaway, are roughly the same proportion of my income -- about 30 percent -- as that paid by the receptionist in our office. My case is not atypical -- my earnings, like those of many rich people, are a mix of capital gains and ordinary income -- nor is it affected by tax shelters (I've never used any). As it works out, I pay a somewhat higher rate for my combination of salary, investment and capital gain income than our receptionist does. But she pays a far higher portion of her income in payroll taxes than I do. . . .

Now the Senate says that dividends should be tax-free to recipients. Suppose this measure goes through and the directors of Berkshire Hathaway (which does not now pay a dividend) therefore decide to pay $1 billion in dividends next year. Owning 31 percent of Berkshire, I would receive $310 million in additional income, owe not another dime in federal tax, and see my tax rate plunge to 3 percent.

And our receptionist? She'd still be paying about 30 percent, which means she would be contributing about 10 times the proportion of her income that I would to such government pursuits as fighting terrorism, waging wars and supporting the elderly. Let me repeat the point: Her overall federal tax rate would be 10 times what my rate would be. . . .

Administration officials say that the $310 million suddenly added to my wallet would stimulate the economy because I would invest it and thereby create jobs. But they conveniently forget that if Berkshire kept the money, it would invest that same amount, creating jobs as well. . . .

Proponents of cutting tax rates on dividends argue that the move will stimulate the economy. A large amount of stimulus, of course, should already be on the way from the huge and growing deficit the government is now running. I have no strong views on whether more action on this front is warranted. But if it is, don't cut the taxes of people with huge portfolios of stocks held directly. (Small investors owning stock held through 401(k)s are already tax-favored.) Instead, give reductions to those who both need and will spend the money gained. Enact a Social Security tax "holiday" or give a flat-sum rebate to people with low incomes. Putting $1,000 in the pockets of 310,000 families with urgent needs is going to provide far more stimulus to the economy than putting the same $310 million in my pockets.

When you listen to tax-cut rhetoric, remember that giving one class of taxpayer a "break" requires -- now or down the line -- that an equivalent burden be imposed on other parties. In other words, if I get a break, someone else pays. Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party.

In pressing significant amendments to the new UN security council resolution on Iraq, France and Russia did Britain a favour. The original draft, principally authored by the US, failed to give a central role to the UN and was objectionable in several other respects, not least in its silence on resumed UN weapons inspections. The resolution passed yesterday corrects some of these imbalances.

It is now agreed that the UN's special representative will have an influential, though not decisive, say in Iraq's political rehabilitation; that the occupying powers (the US and Britain) must report regularly to the council; that there will be strengthened international monitoring of the management of Iraq's oil revenues; and that the UN oil-for-food programme - vital while Iraq's humanitarian situation remains so precarious - will continue for at least six months. The resolution is still unsatisfactorily vague about future, "confirmatory" UN inspections, promising only to "revisit" the issue. It sets no timetable for the establishment of a new Iraqi government while giving extraordinary powers to the occupiers. Conversely, they have accepted open-ended financial obligations that may yet prove exceptionally onerous for British taxpayers given the steadily falling estimates of Iraq's oil earnings in the next five years. But overall, this is a better outcome than might have been expected after all the pre-war ructions.

Despite the way it was achieved, the lifting of sanctions on Iraq, the cause of so many years of pointless suffering and fruitless argument, is a matter for celebration. So, too, is this symbolic and to a lesser degree practical reassertion of the UN's primacy in conferring both inter national legality and legitimacy. By forcing a softening of the US position, France in particular has helped Britain secure what Tony Blair calls a "solid basis" for future policy in Iraq but one which Mr Blair, despite his much-vaunted influence in Washington, could not by himself achieve. By accepting a text that they regard as less than perfect, France and its anti-war allies have served a larger cause by putting the UN "back in the game", as France's foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, puts it. After all the calumny unfairly heaped on French heads in recent months, Mr Blair and colleagues would do well to acknowledge this debt.

The House intelligence committee, expressing concern about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, asked Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet yesterday "to reevaluate U.S. intelligence" used by the Bush administration before the war to describe Iraq's proscribed weapons programs and its links to terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda.

The administration based its argument for going to war against Iraq on the dangers posed by Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and its alleged ties to al Qaeda.

The CIA, at the suggestion of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, has an unusual study underway that will compare intelligence given to President Bush and other policymakers before the war to information now being gathered in Iraq from the ousted Iraqi government's files and interrogations of former Iraqi government personnel, according to senior intelligence officials. . . .

One official who has read a draft of the NIC and CIA prewar studies said, "There is no question there was a lot of pressure on analysts to support preconceived judgments." But, he added, "the analysts' record is not bad when you consider you have strong policymakers pushing analysts for information that supports their specific views."

Neither the agency's study nor the committee's request addresses how accurately top policymakers, in particular Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, portrayed the classified intelligence and advice they received before making their public statements.

The chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said yesterday that he suspected that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction,

He added that "in this respect" the war might not have been justified.

"I am obviously very interested in the question of whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction - and I am beginning to suspect there possibly were none," he said in an interview with the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. . . .

He referred to Saddam Hussein's chief scientific adviser, Lieutenant General Amer al-Saadi, who surrendered last month and said in an interview: "Nothing else will come out after the end of the war."

"The fact that al-Saadi surrendered and said there were no weapons of mass destruction has led to me to ask myself whether there actually were any," Dr Blix said.

"I don't see why he would still be afraid of the regime. Other leading figures have said the same." . . .

The appointment of L. Paul Bremer III early this month as the new head of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq, portrayed by the Bush administration as part of a smoothly running postwar plan, was a hastily arrived-at decision by a White House increasingly worried about collapsing civil order in Iraq, according to senior administration officials. . . .

Postwar plans drawn up in January and February included the eventual installation of a senior civilian "of stature" to be in charge of non-military aspects of the occupation during an indefinite period between Garner's early efforts and the election of an Iraqi government. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had interviewed and signed off on Bremer in April, but announcements of his appointment and departure were still seen as weeks, if not months, away.

Powell was "surprised" by the decision to advance Bremer's departure for Iraq, one official said, "but it was a nice surprise" since Bremer is a former Foreign Service officer. Rumsfeld, who was traveling overseas when the news broke here on May 1, approved of Bremer but was said to be irritated that reports portrayed the sudden decision as a victory for Powell. Rumsfeld issued a terse statement praising Garner and saying no decision on any change had been announced.

Garner, who now works for Bremer, originally signed up to stay in Iraq until July 1. It is not clear how long he will remain.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 23 -- The American occupation authority in Iraq, apparently preserving the prewar distinction between Kurdish-controlled northern areas and the rest of the country, will allow Kurdish fighters to keep their assault rifles and heavy weapons, but require Shiite Muslim and other militias to surrender theirs, according to a draft directive.

The plan has engendered intense criticism by Shiite leaders involved in negotiations with American and British officials who have met privately with the heavily armed political groups that have moved into the power vacuum here.

"Maybe we didn't fight with the coalition, but we didn't fight against them," said Adel Abdul Mahdi, an official of the largest Shiite group, which is headed by Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim. "We want conditions where all militias are dissolved and we will not accept that other militias will be allowed to stay there with their weapons while we will not be there with ours."

Under the draft order, obtained by The New York Times, "militias that assisted coalition forces who remain under the supervision of coalition forces" will be authorized "to possess automatic or heavy weapons." . . .

Besides the armed Shiite groups, the main militia in Iraq are the Kurds and the Free Iraqi Forces of the Iraqi National Congress under Ahmad Chalabi.

General McKiernan said today that Mr. Chalabi's militia was being "demilitarized."

When Mr. Chalabi's militia first surfaced in Iraq last month, it received training from under the supervision of an American Special Forces officer.

On Thursday night, armed fighters from the Iraqi National Congress engaged in a running gun battle with unknown foes during what was described as a search by Mr. Chalabi's forces for senior Baath Party members in a Baghdad suburb.

After the firefight, American troops raided Mr. Chalabi's headquarters at Baghdad's Hunting Club, arrested 35 of his militiamen and seized their weapons. They were released, Mr. Chalabi's group said in a statement, after an American military officer assigned as a liaison to the group intervened.

Kurdish and Shiite Muslim leaders confirmed in interviews this week that senior military commanders, including Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, the deputy commander of American forces in the region, and General McKiernan had briefed them on the disarmament directive and issued some pointed warnings that they would be disarmed by force if they did not comply.

Officially, all three Bush tax bills, taken together, are estimated to reduce federal revenue by approximately $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. But many of the cuts in each bill are disingenuously designed to lapse within this 10-year window. The administration knows that Congress won't likely allow taxes to go back up at those moments. Those cuts will be extended, and the ultimate reduction in federal revenue will approach an astounding $3 trillion. This means an average annual budget deficit of $420 billion over that period. We've never had a deficit that large in any single year, let alone 10 straight.

Juxtaposed against the gargantuan Social Security and Medicare actuarial deficits, this is ruinous fiscal policy and even worse social policy. But in raw political terms, it is brilliant. It paints the Democrats, and particularly their presidential candidates, into a corner. They are forced to support even larger deficits or call for a rollback of certain tax cuts or accept the utter absence of budget resources to pay for any new initiatives, from health care on down. Each of these choices is politically excruciating, just as the White House planned it.

But, perversely, there is a bright side. Problems this big lend themselves to simple approaches, such as these: (1) The Bush tax cuts are excessive and, in part, should be rolled back; and (2) future budget deficits should be smaller than the president is proposing. A Democrat with the courage to adopt these principles and communicate them effectively becomes the truth-teller and could go far. . . .

The task for the Democrats is twofold: first, to help the public understand these choices by explaining them effectively. That's not an impossible task. John F. Kennedy could have done it and so could Bill Clinton. Second, they must take the courageous step of advocating the fiscal policy we require: rolling back some of these Bush tax cuts. Only in this way can we pay for at least the few initiatives this society must have and shrink the future deficits this administration has created. Americans need to be reminded that just a few years ago, the achievement of a balanced budget for the first time in 50 years, and under a Democratic president, led to extraordinary prosperity.

Would this be politically suicidal? No. Just returning the top income tax rate to 39.6 percent (the Clinton rate), retaining the estate tax and leaving dividend taxation where it is saves nearly $1 trillion compared with the Bush plan. And the first step would affect only those with annual incomes over $400,000.

History tells us that Americans always respond to real leadership. We'll see if there is a presidential Democrat with the courage and communication skills to make this case. If there is one, next year's election may be much more competitive than you think.

The United States is illegally holding thousands of Iraqi prisoners of war and other captives without access to human rights officials at compounds close to Baghdad airport, The Observer has learnt.

There have also been reports of a mutiny last week by prisoners at an airport compound, in protest against conditions. The uprising was 'dealt with' by the Americans, according to a US military source.

The International Committee of the Red Cross so far has been denied access to what the organisation believes could be as many as 3,000 prisoners held in searing heat. All other requests to inspect conditions under which prisoners are being held have been met with silence or been turned down. . . .

The ICRC has gained access to prisoners held in camps at Umm Qasr in the south. But with regard to the larger numbers reportedly held in Baghdad, said Doumani, 'we are still waiting for the green light, more than a month after the end of the conflict. This is in breach of the third Geneva Convention.' She said the laws of war should give the ICRC access 'as quickly as possible'. . . .

Witnesses to the camps are few, since no Iraqi prisoners taken to them have been released. But a cameraman for the France 3 television channel, arrested at the Palestine Hotel, did manage a glimpse. Leo Nicolian has documentation signed by a Lieutenant Brad Fisher saying he was wrongly arrested (and beaten, with a black eye to prove it) for the alleged theft of a bag from an American reporter.

He was held at the tennis court compound along with, he said, about 50 other prisoners, and told he was detained 'for investigation'. On his way out, Nicolian said he passed a bigger encampment in which he saw 'hundreds of men' hooded, with their arms tied behind their backs.

The Bush administration, alarmed by intelligence suggesting that al Qaeda operatives in Iran had a role in the May 12 suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia, has suspended once-promising contacts with Iran and appears ready to embrace an aggressive policy of trying to destabilize the Iranian government, administration officials said.

Senior Bush administration officials will meet Tuesday at the White House to discuss the evolving strategy toward the Islamic republic, with Pentagon officials pressing hard for public and private actions that they believe could lead to the toppling of the government through a popular uprising, officials said.

The State Department, which had encouraged some form of engagement with the Iranians, appears inclined to accept such a policy, especially if Iran does not take any visible steps to deal with the suspected al Qaeda operatives before Tuesday, officials said. But State Department officials are concerned that the level of popular discontent there is much lower than Pentagon officials believe, leading to the possibility that U.S. efforts could ultimately discredit reformers in Iran.

In any case, the Saudi Arabia bombings have ended the tentative signs of engagement between Iran and the United States that had emerged during the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. . . .

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld accused Iran of harboring al Qaeda members. "There's no question but that there have been and are today senior al Qaeda leaders in Iran, and they are busy," Rumsfeld said. Iranian officials, however, have vehemently denied that they have granted al Qaeda leaders safe haven in the country.

Until the Saudi bombings, some officials said, Iran had been relatively cooperative on al Qaeda. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Iran has turned over al Qaeda officials to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. In talks, U.S. officials had repeatedly warned Iranian officials that if any al Qaeda operatives in Iran are implicated in attacks against Americans, it would have serious consequences for relations between the two countries.

The UN's most senior humanitarian official in Iraq warned yesterday that US attempts to rebuild the country were overly dominated by "ideology" and risked triggering a violent backlash.

Ramiro Lopes da Silva said the sudden decision last week to demobilise 400,000 Iraqi soldiers without any re-employment programme could generate a "low-intensity conflict" in the countryside. . . .

Mr Lopes da Silva said the UN "disagreed" with some of the decisions made by the US-led authority in Baghdad.

He was surprised the decision to disband the Iraqi military had not been accompanied by an attempt to reintegrate soldiers into society.

"The way the decision was taken leaves them in a vacuum," he said. "Our concern is that if there is nothing for them out there soon this will be a potential source of additional destabilisation."

Even US generals admitted at the time they feared the decision could worsen the lawlessness and looting. Mr Lopes da Silva said the demobilisation, along with tightened security in the capital, could force looters into the less well-guarded countryside.

"What you are potentially going to create is more banditry and a low-intensity conflict in the rural areas," he said. "These edicts are seen very much just as ideological statements."

Mr Lopes da Silva also questioned the authority's de-Ba'athification programme, under which up to 30,000 Ba'ath party officials are automatically excluded from office. "Many bureaucrats who have important experience that would help the new government were only Ba'ath party members on paper," he said.

In another step against the Ba'ath party yesterday, US military officials fired the police chief for west Baghdad against the advice of several American soldiers. Abdul Razak al-Abbassi, who for the past three weeks has helped bring hundreds of officers back to work, was dismissed because he had been a senior member of the Ba'ath party under Saddam.

Will the Iraq war increase America's national security, as the Bush Administration has always promised and now insists is already the case, or will it undermine and diminish our national security, as thoughtful critics believed?

In the weeks, months and years ahead, we will learn the answer to that fateful question by judging developments by seven essential criteria:

(1) Will the war discourage or encourage other regional "preemptive" military strikes, particularly by nuclear-armed states such as, but not only, India and Pakistan? India has already evoked that newly proclaimed US doctrine in its conflict with Pakistan, as has Russia in its increasingly hostile relations with the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

(2) Indeed, will the Iraq war stop the proliferation of states that possess nuclear weapons or instead incite more governments to acquire them as a deterrent against another US "regime change"? If anything, North Korea and Iran have seemed even more determined to develop such weapons.

(3) Will the war, and the long US occupation that is likely to ensue, reduce the recruitment of young Arabs by terrorist movements or will it inspire many new recruits? The subsequent suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco suggest that the latter result will be the case.

(4) With or without more recruits, will the war decrease or increase the number of terrorist plots against the United States, whether at home or abroad? Here too the recent targeting of a US firm in Saudi Arabia and continuing "terrorist" attacks on American troops even in Iraq itself are not good signs.

(5) Will the war help safeguard the vast quantities of nuclear and other materials of mass destruction that exist in the world today, and the expertise needed to operationalize them, or make them more accessible to "evil-doers"? In this exceedingly perilous respect, the war may have aleady made things worse. Not only has the Bush Administration yet to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, its original professed purpose for attacking the country, but the war led directly to the looting of at least seven Iraqi nuclear facilities and thus possibly to a new kind of proliferation.

(6) In that connection, will Russia--which has more ill-secured devices of mass destruction than any other country and which strongly opposed and still resents the US war--now be more, or less, inclined to collaborate with Washington in safeguarding and reducing those weapons and materials? Again, the initial result has been contrary to American national security interests. On May 16, President Vladimir V. Putin announced that the Kremlin, like the White House, is likely to build even more nuclear weapons.

(7) Finally, considering the rampant anti-Americanism it has provoked, will the war result in more or fewer governments willing to cooperate with--individually or in multinational organizations like the United Nations--George W. Bush's stated top priority, the war against global terrorism? During the weeks since the military campaign ended, anti-American sentiments have continued to grow, from the Middle East to Western Europe, and the United Nations remains profoundly divided by the US war and its ugly aftermath in Iraq.

Republicans, who now control all three branches of the federal government, are not just pushing through their political agenda. They are increasingly ignoring the rules of government to do it. While the Texas redistricting effort failed, Republicans succeeded in enacting an equally partisan redistricting plan in Colorado. And Republicans in the Senate -- notably those involved in the highly charged issue of judicial confirmations -- have been just as quick to throw out the rulebook.

These partisan attacks on the rules of government may be more harmful, and more destabilizing, than bad policies, like the $320 billion tax cut. Modern states, the German sociologist Max Weber wrote, derive their legitimacy from "rational authority," a system in which rules apply in equal and predictable ways, and even those who lead are reined in by limits on their power. When the rules of government are stripped away, people can begin to regard their government as illegitimate. . . .

Weber, in writing about rules, was concerned about what factors kept governments in power. That is not a concern in the United States -- there is no uprising in the offing. But when Americans see their government flouting the rules, as they did during Watergate, they respond with cynicism.

In these hard times -- with threats from abroad and a sour economy at home -- our leaders should be bringing the nation together not by demonizing foreign countries, but by instilling greater faith in our own. They should be showing greater reverence for the rules of government, and looking for other ways -- like tougher campaign finance laws -- to assure Americans that their government operates evenhandedly.

We've found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations' resolutions and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on.

But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them.

Despite 160,000 American and British troops and the world's greatest technology, no weapons of mass destruction have been found. The commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General James Conway, said whatever intelligence he was given on WMD, ''We were simply wrong.'' Conway said, ''We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there.''

Many current and former intelligence officers are now saying that the White House either ignored intelligence reports that failed to confirm weapons of mass destruction or trumped up skimpy or lame reports. A claim by Bush that Saddam was buying uranium from Africa for nuclear weapons turned out to be a forged document on the letterhead of a minister of foreign affairs in Niger who had been out of office for a decade.

Greg Thielmann, a recently retired State Department analyst who could not believe that Bush would use ''that stupid piece of garbage'' to make his case, told Newsweek, ''There is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused.''

A Central Command planner told Newsweek that the CIA's information on the sites where weapons of mass destruction were stored was ''crap.'' An intelligence official told US News and World Report that ''the policy decisions weren't matching the reports we were reading every day.'' In a 2002 document, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded, ''There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons.''

Time quoted a senior military official who helped plan the war in Iraq but quit after seeing the White House exaggerate bad intelligence. Time also quoted an Army intelligence officer who said Rumsfeld ''was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence.''

US News and World Report detailed how Cheney's staff fed Secretary of State Colin Powell reams of ''evidence'' that could not be confirmed on the eve of Powell's testimony to the United Nations. David Albright, a former Atomic Energy Agency arms inspector, said the White House ''deliberately selected information that would increase the perception that Iraq was a serious threat'' and ''made a decision to turn a blind eye'' to the evidence that ''the large number of deployed chemical weapons the administration said that Iraq had are not there.''

Patrick Lang, a former CIA analyst on Iraq, has said intelligence was ''exploited and abused and bypassed'' by the White House. Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of CIA counter-terrorism operations, said many intelligence officials ''believe it is a scandal.'' Cannistraro said Bush had a ''moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas.''

In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.

This administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, which was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable.

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."

It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.

Nixon claimed that his misuses of the federal agencies for his political purposes were in the interest of national security. The same kind of thinking might lead a President to manipulate and misuse national security agencies or their intelligence to create a phony reason to lead the nation into a politically desirable war. Let us hope that is not the case.

Earlier this week it emerged that Mr Powell had been so disturbed about questionable intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that he assembled a secret team to review the information he was given before he made a crucial speech to the UN security council on February 5.

The team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech because they could not be verified, according to the magazine US News and World Report.

At one point he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing of the intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."

According to the magazine Greg Theilmann, a recently retired state department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, says that inside the administration "there was a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused".

Tony Blair's closest adviser has written a personal letter apologising to the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service for discrediting the service with the release last January of the so-called "dodgy dossier" on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.

The disclosure that Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair's director of strategy and communications, apologised to the head of MI6 for the dossier, Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation, will fuel claims that Downing Street was involved in "doctoring" intelligence reports before the war.

Britain's Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported that Mr Campbell put his apology in writing to end a row with the intelligence service over the dossier, after it was revealed that parts were lifted via the internet from a 12-year-old thesis by an American student.

WASHINGTON (AP) The Bush administration distorted intelligence and presented conjecture as evidence to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a retired intelligence official who served during the months before the war.

"What disturbs me deeply is what I think are the disingenuous statements made from the very top about what the intelligence did say," said Greg Thielmann, who retired last September. "The area of distortion was greatest in the nuclear field."

Thielmann was director of the strategic, proliferation and military issues office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. His office was privy to classified intelligence gathered by the CIA and other agencies about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear programs.

In Thielmann's view, Iraq could have presented an immediate threat to U.S. security in two areas: Either it was about to make a nuclear weapon, or it was forming close operational ties with al-Qaida terrorists.

Evidence was lacking for both, despite claims by President Bush and others, Thielmann said in an interview this week. Suspicions were presented as fact, contrary arguments ignored, he said. . . .

Thielmann suggested mistakes may have been made at points all along the chain from when intelligence is gathered, analyzed, presented to the president and then provided to the public.

The evidence of a renewed nuclear program in Iraq was far more limited than the administration contended, he said.

"When the administration did talk about specific evidence it was basically declassified, sensitive information it did it in a way that was also not entirely honest," Thielmann said. . . .

Thielmann said he had presumed Iraq had supplies of chemical and probably biological weapons. He particularly expected U.S. forces to find caches of mustard agent or other chemical weapons left over from Saddam's old stockpiles.

"We appear to have been wrong," he said. "I've been genuinely surprised at that."

From the moment of his disputed election in 2000, President Bush has been dramatically reversing the traditional relationship between politics and policy. In his administration, politics seem less a means to policy than policy is a means to politics. Its goal is not to further the conservative revolution as advertised. The presidency's real goal is to disable the Democratic opposition, once and for all.

This has become a presidential mission partly by default. Bush came to the presidency with no commanding ideology, no grand crusade. He was in league with conservatives, but he was no fire-breather. For him, conservatism seemed a convenience -- the only path to the Republican nomination. One is hard-pressed to think of a single position Bush took during the 2000 campaign, save for his tax cuts, much less a full program. . . .

It has been said of Bush that he intends to finish the Reagan revolution by embedding conservatism so deeply into the governmental fabric that it will take generations to undo it. What he is really finishing, though, is not the Reagan revolution but the Clinton wars, which had far less to do with ideology than with politics. As Rove has engineered it, this is about power, pure and simple. It is about guaranteeing electoral results.

That is why, one suspects, Bush elicits such deep antagonism from the left -- deeper perhaps than any political figure since Nixon, even though he is personally genial and charming. At some level, maybe only subliminally, liberals know what the president and Rove are up to and fear that they will succeed in dismantling an effective two-party system. The left knows that Rove and company aren't keen on debating issues, negotiating, compromising and horse-trading, the usual means of getting things done politically. On the contrary: The administration is intent on foreclosing them.

As much as liberals abhor the conservative agenda, there is something far more frightening to them now -- not that Republicans have an ideological grand plan but that they don't have one. Instead, the GOP plan is policy solely in the service of politics, which should terrify democrats everywhere.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republicans in Congress on Wednesday rebuffed calls by Democrats for a full-blown investigation into whether the Bush administration misread or inflated the threats posed by Iraq before going to war.

But they agreed to hold oversight hearings and review documents on U.S. intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. . . .

Democrats on the two Senate committees that oversee intelligence operations called for a formal joint investigation of the administration's case on Iraq's weapons and alleged links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

"We've got to make sure that the CIA does not embellish or distort in any way the intelligence information in order to advance a policy of any administration," said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat, called the Republicans' plan for oversight hearings "entirely inadequate and slow-paced."

"I'm not sure whether they really want to get to the crux of what really happened," he said, adding that he would keep pressing for a broad inquiry.

Hussein represented only one of many thuggish regimes, and that the United States is not about to go to war against them all. I supported this war because I believed Bush and Blair when they said Iraq was manufacturing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons in the hands of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations that shared Hussein's hostile designs made such a threat a defense priority - or so the argument went.

Early this month, the U.S. military announced that it had found three mobile laboratories that were most likely designed to manufacture chemical or biological weapons, the types of labs that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred to in making his argument for war before the U.N. Security Council. The discoveries were suggestive but hardly convincing evidence of the specific, tangible threat repeatedly outlined by the President. With the authors of Iraq's illicit-weapons program now in custody, we should expect to see soon, or to have seen already, the facilities and stockpiles we and most of the rest of the world believed Hussein possessed.

They may yet be found, but it is beginning to look as though the skeptics in this case were right. If so, I was taken in by this administration, and America and Great Britain were led to war under false pretenses.

Events have moved so swiftly, and Hussein's toppling has posed so many new pressing problems, that it would be easy to lose sight of this issue, but it is critically important. I can imagine no greater breach of public trust than to mislead a country into war. A strong case might have been made to go after Hussein just because he posed a potential threat to us and the region, because of his support for suicide bombers, and because of his ruthless oppression of his own people. But this is not the case our President chose to make. . . .

I trusted Bush, and unless something big develops on the weapons front in Iraq soon, it appears as though I was fooled by him. Perhaps he himself was taken in by his intelligence and military advisers. If so, he ought to be angry as hell, because ultimately he bears the responsibility.

American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment. . . .

In all, at least three teams of Western experts have now examined the trailers and evidence from them. While the first two groups to see the trailers were largely convinced that the vehicles were intended for the purpose of making germ agents, the third group of more senior analysts divided sharply over the function of the trailers, with several members expressing strong skepticism, some of the dissenters said. . . .

The skeptical experts said the mobile plants lacked gear for steam sterilization, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production, peaceful or otherwise. Its lack of availability between production runs would threaten to let in germ contaminants, resulting in failed weapons.

Second, if this shortcoming were somehow circumvented, each unit would still produce only a relatively small amount of germ-laden liquid, which would have to undergo further processing at some other factory unit to make it concentrated and prepare it for use as a weapon.

Finally, they said, the trailers have no easy way for technicians to remove germ fluids from the processing tank.

Senior intelligence officials in Washington rebutted the skeptics, saying, for instance, that the Iraqis might have obtained the needed steam for sterilization from a separate supply truck.

The skeptics noted further that the mobile plants had a means of easily extracting gas. Iraqi scientists have said the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. While the white paper dismisses that as a cover story, some analysts see the Iraqi explanation as potentially credible. . . .

William C. Patrick III, a senior official in the germ warfare program that Washington renounced in 1969, said the lack of steam sterilization had caused him to question the germ-plant theory that he had once tentatively endorsed. "That's a huge minus," he said. "I don't see how you can clean those tanks chemically." . . .

Some doubters noted that the intelligence community was still scrambling to analyze the trailers, suggesting that the white paper may have been premature. They said laboratories in the Middle East and the United States were now analyzing more than 100 samples from the trailers to verify the intelligence findings. Allied forces, they noted, have so far failed to find any of the envisioned support vehicles that the trailers would need to produce biological weapons.

One skeptic questioned the practicality of some of the conjectural steps the Iraqis are envisioned as having taken to adapt the trailers to the job of making deadly germs.

"It's not built and designed as a standard fermenter," he said of the central tank. "Certainly, if you modify it enough you could use it. But that's true of any tin can."

Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector, lashed out last night at the "bastards" who have tried to undermine him throughout the three years he has held his high-profile post.

In an extraordinary departure from the diplomatic language with which he has come to be associated, Mr Blix assailed his critics in both Washington and Iraq.

Speaking exclusively to the Guardian from his 31st floor office at the UN in New York, Mr Blix said: "I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media. Not that I cared very much.

"It was like a mosquito bite in the evening that is there in the morning, an irritant."

In a wide-ranging interview Mr Blix, who retires in three weeks' time, accused:

-- The Bush administration of leaning on his inspectors to produce more damning language in their reports;

-- "Some elements" of the Pentagon of being behind a smear campaign against him; and

-- Washington of regarding the UN as an "alien power" which they hoped would sink into the East river.

Asked if he believed he had been the target of a deliberate smear campaign he said: "Yes, I probably was at a lower level."

[L]et me offer some more detail about the uranium saga. Piecing the story together from two people directly involved and three others who were briefed on it, the tale begins at the end of 2001, when third-rate forged documents turned up in West Africa purporting to show the sale by Niger to Iraq of tons of "yellowcake" uranium.

Italy's intelligence service obtained the documents and shared them with British spooks, who passed them on to Washington. Mr. Cheney's office got wind of this and asked the C.I.A. to investigate.

The agency chose a former ambassador to Africa to undertake the mission, and that person flew to Niamey, Niger, in the last week of February 2002. This envoy spent one week in Niger, staying at the Sofitel and discussing his findings with the U.S. ambassador to Niger, and then flew back to Washington via Paris.

Immediately upon his return, in early March 2002, this senior envoy briefed the C.I.A. and State Department and reported that the documents were bogus, for two main reasons. First, the documents seemed phony on their face -- for example, the Niger minister of energy and mines who had signed them had left that position years earlier. Second, an examination of Niger's uranium industry showed that an international consortium controls the yellowcake closely, so the Niger government does not have any yellowcake to sell.

Officials now claim that the C.I.A. inexplicably did not report back to the White House with this envoy's findings and reasoning, or with an assessment of its own that the information was false. I hear something different. My understanding is that while Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet may not have told Mr. Bush that the Niger documents were forged, lower C.I.A. officials did tell both the vice president's office and National Security Council staff members. Moreover, I hear from another source that the C.I.A.'s operations side and its counterterrorism center undertook their own investigations of the documents, poking around in Italy and Africa, and also concluded that they were false -- a judgment that filtered to the top of the C.I.A.

Meanwhile, the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, independently came to the exact same conclusion about those documents, according to Greg Thielmann, a former official there. Mr. Thielmann said he was "quite confident" that the conclusion had been passed up to the top of the State Department.

"It was well known throughout the intelligence community that it was a forgery," said Melvin Goodman, a former C.I.A. analyst who is now at the Center for International Policy.

Still, Mr. Tenet and the intelligence agencies were under intense pressure to come up with evidence against Iraq. Ambiguities were lost, and doubters were discouraged from speaking up.

"It was a foregone conclusion that every photo of a trailer truck would be a `mobile bioweapons lab' and every tanker truck would be `filled with weaponized anthrax,' " a former military intelligence officer said. "None of the analysts in military uniform had the option to debate the vice president, secretary of defense and the secretary of state."

An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.

The conclusion by biological weapons experts working for the British Government is an embarrassment for the Prime Minister, who has claimed that the discovery of the labs proved that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction and justified the case for going to war against Saddam Hussein.

Instead, a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.'

The conclusion of the investigation ordered by the British Government - and revealed by The Observer last week - is hugely embarrassing for Blair, who had used the discovery of the alleged mobile labs as part of his efforts to silence criticism over the failure of Britain and the US to find any weapons of mass destruction since the invasion of Iraq. . . .

The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control.

WASHINGTON - A third of the American public believes U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll. Twenty-two percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons.

But such weapons have not been found in Iraq and were not used.

Before the war, half of those polled in a survey said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. But most of the Sept. 11 terrorists were Saudis; none was an Iraqi.

The results startled even the pollsters who conducted and analyzed the surveys. How could so many people be so wrong about information that has dominated news coverage for almost two years?

"It's a striking finding," said Steve Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which asked the weapons questions during a May 14-18 poll of 1,256 respondents.

He added: "Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public attention, this level of misinformation suggests some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance."

That is, of having their beliefs conflict with the facts. Kull noted that the mistaken belief that weapons had been found "is substantially greater among those who favored the war." . . .

Before the war, the U.S. media often reported as a fact the assertions by the Bush administration that Iraq possessed large stockpiles of illegal weapons.

During and after the war, reports of possible weapons discoveries were often trumpeted on front pages, while follow-up stories debunking the reports received less attention.