"Q: Secretary Rumsfeld, when did you know that the reports about [Iraq seeking] uranium coming out of Africa were bogus?

"A: Oh, within recent days, since the information started becoming available."

-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, answering a question posed by Sen. Mark Pryor, D.-Ark., at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services committee, July 10.

Fri July 11, 2003 03:42 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee criticized the CIA on Friday for "sloppy handling" of faulty information that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa, and specifically blamed CIA Director George Tenet.

"So far, I am very disturbed by what appears to be extremely sloppy handling of the issue from the outset by the CIA," Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas said in a statement.

Every civilization since the beginning of man has recognized the need for marriage. This country and healthy societies around the world give marriage special legal protection for a vital reason -- it is the institution that ensures the society's future through the upbringing of children. Furthermore, it's just common sense that marriage is the union of a man and a woman.

-- Rick Santorum in USA Today, 7/11/03

He said that as late as about 10 days before President Bush's January State of the Union speech, the CIA was "still asserting that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium from Africa and that those attempts were further evidence of Saddam's efforts to reconstitute his nuclear program." . . .

"I have seen no documentation that indicates that the CIA had reversed itself after January 17th and prior to the State of the Union," Roberts said.

"If the CIA had changed its position, it was incumbent on the director of Central Intelligence to correct the record and bring it to the immediate attention of the president. It appears that he did not," Roberts said.

"This is not the type of responsibility that can be delegated to midlevel officials. The director of Central Intelligence is the president's principal adviser on intelligence matters. He should have told the president and it appears that he failed to do so," Roberts said.

A CIA spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.

HOW CAN BUSH fix the mess in Iraq if he denies any missteps? This administration's unwillingness to ever admit a mistake makes it unlikely it will expand the force size in Iraq, take responsibility for the phony intelligence Bush touted as a prelude to war or eat enough humble pie to get military and financial help from other nations. The White House won't acknowledge anything that might chip away at Bush?s commander-in-chief image. That?s the nature of the reelection machine that Karl Rove has constructed in his role as Bush's consigliere. To admit flaws risks losing the luster of the wartime president.

Bush's insecurities are at the heart of it. Haunted by his father's defeat and the accidental nature of his own presidency, Bush never wants to hand his enemies ammunition. He can't let cracks appear or the whole edifice could crumble. The moment Bush landed on the USS Lincoln, he was caught in his own net of hubris. The juvenile taunt "Bring 'em on" diminishes the seriousness of sending men and women into an urban guerilla battle that nobody prepared them for. American soldiers in Iraq are going on the record with reporters to say how unhappy they are, and how vulnerable they feel. You don't do that in the military unless the conditions are dire. ...

The drip-drip of bad news from Iraq is reflected in the polls, though it does not yet pose a political problem for Bush. A majority of voters dismiss the wrangling over what Bush knew and when he knew it as partisan. But America's good name is under attack around the world, and Bush's credibility has foreign-policy consequences, making it much more difficult to undertake other interventions. The hawkish neocons who urged the war on Iraq are dismayed over what's happening because Iraq was supposed to be easy. "Iraq was the low-hanging fruit," says a Republican Senate aide, who backed the war. Taking down Saddam was a test case for the real thing, regime change in Iran. Now the administration is standing down on its rhetoric toward Iran, a welcome intrusion of reality in Bush's fantasy presidency.

Continuing attacks against U.S. soldiers in Iraq combined with a growing controversy over pre-war intelligence have prompted opposition Democrats to raise new questions about President Bush's foreign policy record. There was a bit of a sea change in Washington this week. The wide public-backing of the president's foreign policy had long intimidated Democrats. But rising casualties among U.S. troops in Iraq and a White House admission of faulty pre-war intelligence have Democrats on the offensive. . . .

A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that only 23 percent of those surveyed felt the military effort in Iraq is going "very well." That is down from 61 percent in April. But the same poll also found that 66 percent of those asked still favor a major U.S. commitment to rebuilding Iraq.

Since President Bush announced the end of major military operations on May 1, it has become increasingly clear that the Iraq war is not over, that there is a concerted campaign of resistance and that Mr. Hussein remains a formidable foe. Over the last 10 days the chief American official in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, has frequently stressed the importance of capturing or killing Mr. Hussein.

The campaign to kill him, frankly admitted and discussed by high officials in the White House, Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency, has committed the United States for the first time to public, personalized, open-ended warfare in the classic mode of Middle Eastern violence -- an eye for an eye, a life for a life. . . .

Realists may scoff that war is war and that things have always been this way, but in fact personalized killing has a way of deepening the bitterness of war without bringing conflict closer to resolution. In April 1986 President Reagan authorized an air raid on the home of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya that spared him but killed his daughter. The Reagan administration never acknowledged that Colonel Qaddafi, personally, was the target, nor did it publicly speculate two years later that Libya's bombing of an American jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, was Colonel Qaddafi's revenge for the death of his daughter. But the administration got the message: after Lockerbie, Washington relied on legal action to settle the score.

It is impossible to know how, or if, Mr. Hussein's supporters will find a way to retaliate for the American campaign to kill the deposed Iraqi leader, but that effort inevitably reopens a long-simmering American argument over assassination, never embraced openly in so many words but never repudiated once and for all. Despite much tough talk of killing enemies since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration still shrinks from using the word assassination, and much of the public continues to oppose it as both dangerous and wrong -- dangerous because it commits the United States to a campaign of murder and countermurder, and wrong because hunting people down, however it plays in the movies, excuses murder by calling it something else. . . .

"Removing Saddam" has been the stated goal of the administration for more than a year, and last fall Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said war with Iraq could be avoided at "the cost of one bullet." This open discussion of killing Mr. Hussein marks a profound retreat from the longstanding insistence that the United States did not and would not use assassination as a tool of state.

"Every two years at election time, the party goes through an agony of self-reflection and recently self-reproach," says Robert Reich, a prominent progressive who served as Clinton's secretary of labor. "They ask: Should we move right and get more of the so-called suburban swing voter or should we have the courage of our progressive convictions and generate more enthusiasm among the base? What's left out of the debate is an acknowledgment that half of adult Americans who are qualified to vote no longer do so. The only way to get them into the voting booths is to give them something to vote for, a real choice, real ideals and a strong and bold vision of where the country is and where it should be going." . . . "The typical American shares the values of most liberal activists and progressives," says Reich, "but the typical American has been fed a nonstop diet of lies and angry, snide, resentful, bitter diatribes by right-wing radio talk-show hosts and right-wing TV talk-show hosts. The typical American doesn't know what the facts are. He believes that the typical family is getting a $1,000 tax cut. He believes Saddam Hussein was somehow responsible for 9/11. He doesn't know that Afghanistan is falling apart, he doesn't know that we're completely unprepared for a terrorist attack. He hasn't been told that most of the corporate scandals of 2002 could happen again because most of the legislation never went anywhere."

Reich is careful not to denigrate such Americans. "These are very intelligent people," he says, "but if you're fed nothing but lies and resentment mixed in with the sort of targets that have nothing to do with the reasons your finances and prospects are poor, you are probably going to buy some of this Orwellian trash. You may be quite thoughtful, but you're not superhuman. Unless or until the Democrats tell it like it is and also stand up for what they believe, America is not going to wake up."

Reich's comment gets to the heart of the debate. There's a sense among activist Democrats that many voters are asleep and that only a blunt, uncompromising message can rouse them. The DLC, meanwhile, is convinced that liberals are a minority not because most Americans don't understand them, but because they disagree with them.

If you start from the premise that Americans have been duped, you can sound like you're "telling people they're stupid for not understanding what we understand," says the DLC's Kilgore. "There's a certain tone of condescension."

But declining to challenge voters also can be a kind of condescension. "I think it's important to keep a sense of humor and be upbeat and even optimistic, but we've got to tell it like it is and also talk about our values," says Reich. "We can't be defensive. We can't assume, as the DLC does, that somehow we're out of step with average Americans."

The CIA chief, George Tenet, yesterday took the blame for President George Bush's discredited claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to procure uranium from Africa.

Mr Tenet's admission of error was made at the end of a day when the CIA chief came under attack, and after a week when the furore over false intelligence appeared to be reaching a critical point.

In a statement, Mr Tenet said he had been wrong to allow Mr Bush to include the line that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear material from Niger in his state of the union address in January. . . .

By shouldering the blame, Mr Tenet was trying to limit Mr Bush's exposure to a controversy that is assuming ever larger proportions.

With the furore threatening to eclipse Mr Bush's tour of Africa, the president and his national security adviser, Con doleezza Rice, disassociated the White House from the uranium claim yesterday.

Ms Rice insisted the agency had cleared the claim in the president's speech, adding that if the CIA director had any misgivings, "he did not make them known".

Hours later, Mr Tenet agreed that he was responsible. "Let me be clear about several things right up front," he said. "First, CIA approved the president's state of the union address before it was delivered. Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. And third, the president had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound." . . .

Earlier yesterday, the Republican chairman of the intelligence committee, Pat Roberts, made it clear that he held Mr Tenet entirely to blame. He went on to question Mr Tenet's loyalty, accusing the CIA of seeking to damage President Bush through a series of leaked stories from anonymous officials that have fuelled speculation over the administration's flawed claims on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

CIA Director George J. Tenet successfully intervened with White House officials to have a reference to Iraq seeking uranium from Niger removed from a presidential speech last October, three months before a less specific reference to the same intelligence appeared in the State of the Union address, according to senior administration officials.

Tenet argued personally to White House officials, including deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, that the allegation should not be used because it came from only a single source, according to one senior official. Another senior official with knowledge of the intelligence said the CIA had doubts about the accuracy of the documents underlying the allegation, which months later turned out to be forged.

The new disclosure suggests how eager the White House was in January to make Iraq's nuclear program a part of its case against Saddam Hussein even in the face of earlier objections by its own CIA director. It also appears to raise questions about the administration's explanation of how the faulty allegations were included in the State of the Union speech.

It is unclear why Tenet failed to intervene in January to prevent the questionable intelligence from appearing in the president's address to Congress when Tenet had intervened three months earlier in a much less symbolic speech. That failure may underlie his action Friday in taking responsibility for not stepping in again to question the reference. "I am responsible for the approval process in my agency," he said in Friday's statement.

Britain and America suffered a complete breakdown in relations over vital evidence against Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, refusing to share information and keeping each other in the dark over key elements of the case against the Iraqi dictator.

In a remarkable letter released last night, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, reveals a catalogue of disputes between the two countries, lending more ammunition to critics of the war and exerting fresh pressure on the Prime Minister.

The letter to the Foreign Affairs Committee, which investigated the case for war against Iraq, reveals that Britain ignored a request from the CIA to remove claims that Saddam was trying to buy nuclear material from Niger, despite concerns that the allegations were bogus. It also details a government decision to block information going to the CIA because it was too sensitive.

As diplomatic relations between America and Britain become increasingly strained over Iraq's WMD, Straw said that the Government had separate evidence of the Niger link, which it has not shared with the US. . . .

Straw's letter reveals:

• That evidence given to the CIA by the former US ambassador to Gabon, Joseph Wilson - that Niger officials had denied any link - was never shared with the British.
• That Foreign Office officials were left to read reports of Wilson's findings in the press only days before they were raised as part of the committee's inquiry into the war.
• That when the CIA, having seen a draft of the September dossier on Iraq's WMD, demanded that the Niger claim be removed, it was ignored because the agency did not back it up with 'any explanation'.

Although publicly the two governments are trying to maintain a united front, the admission two days ago by the head of the CIA, George Tenet, that President Bush should never have made the claim about the Niger connection to Iraq, has left British officials exposed.

Boiled down to their bare bones, the allegations go like this: with deep suspicion at the Langley, Virginia, headquarters of the CIA over allegations of Iraqi attempts to procure uranium ore from Niger, the CIA was getting cold feet. What evidence they did have, as Tenet admitted on Friday, was fragmentary.

So, in early 2000, the CIA dispatched a former US ambassador, Joseph Wilson, to investigate the claims. He rapidly concluded that the alleged Iraqi procurement programme did not exist, and at most Baghdad had merely attempted to discuss improved trade relations with Niger in the late 1990s.

Wilson and the CIA became convinced that some evidence of the Niger connection was based on crudely forged documents that agency sources suggested had been obtained by Italian authorities and passed on to Britain which - the same sources told the US media - passed the forgeries on to the CIA. When those documents emerged after Bush's State of the Union address, they would be quickly exposed by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna as the confections that they were.

Crucially, despite knowing of the dubious nature of the Niger connection, the CIA did not impress upon the White House its serious doubts. Instead, it allowed the President, citing 'British intelligence' as proof, to claim the Niger connection as hard evidence of Saddam's efforts to rebuild a nuclear arsenal.

If Tenet's account is true, it is doubly embarrassing, for the CIA had made its reservations clear elsewhere, if not to Bush.

The previous year, ahead of Blair's September 2002 dossier setting out the British case against Saddam, the CIA told London that the Niger claim was deeply questionable. And it also warned US Secretary of State Colin Powell against using the Niger evidence before he made his powerful presentation about the Iraqi threat to the UN in February, just weeks after Bush's State of the Union address.

In other words, the CIA told everyone about its doubts except the White House.

What is most revealing is Tenet's admission that the central claim was left in Bush's speech because it had been attributed to British intelligence. Agency officials 'in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct, i.e. that the British Government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa,' Tenet said.

'This should not have been the test for clearing a presidential address. This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed.'

But there is a big question hanging over Tenet's account. For Britain vehemently rejects American claims that the Niger link was based solely on the forged documents or that it supplied any intelligence on the Niger connection to the CIA.

'The information in the British Government's September dossier regarding Niger categorically did not come from the forged Italian documents; it came from our own source. That information was not passed on to the US,' said an intelligence source last week. 'It was an entirely separate and credible source.'

On one crucial issue Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, in his letter released yesterday, does agree with the US version of events. He admits that the CIA did warn Britain against including claims on the Niger connection in the Government's September dossier on WMD.

'The media have reported that the CIA expressed reservations to us about the [Niger] element of the September dossier,' he said. 'This is correct. However, the US comment was unsupported and UK officials were confident that the dossier's statement was based on reliable intelligence which we had not shared with the US.'

The consequence of the gulf between these two positions is a new crisis over the intelligence on Iraq that is no longer limited to either just Britain or the US. For the first time Washington and London now point their fingers at each other.

Mr. Tenet, in his continuing effort to ingratiate himself to his bosses, agreed to take the fall, trying to minimize a year's worth of war-causing warping of intelligence as a slip of the keyboard. "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president," he said, in 15 words that were clearly written for him on behalf of the president. But it won't fly.

It was Ms. Rice's responsibility to vet the intelligence facts in the president's speech and take note of the red alert the tentative Tenet was raising. Colin Powell did when he set up camp at the C.I.A. for a week before his U.N. speech, double-checking what he considered unsubstantiated charges that the Cheney chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and other hawks wanted to sluice into his talk.

When the president attributed the information about Iraq trying to get Niger yellowcake to British intelligence, it was a Clintonian bit of flim-flam. Americans did not know what top Bush officials knew: that this "evidence" could not be attributed to American intelligence because the C.I.A. had already debunked it.

Ms. Rice did not throw out the line, even though the C.I.A. had warned her office that it was sketchy. Clearly, a higher power wanted it in.

And that had to be Dick Cheney's office. Joseph Wilson, former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, said he was asked to go to Niger to answer some questions from the vice president's office about that episode and reported back that it was highly doubtful.

President Bush yesterday defended the "darn good" intelligence he receives, continuing to stand behind a disputed allegation about Iraq's nuclear ambitions as new evidence surfaced indicating the administration had early warning that the charge could be false.

Bush said the CIA's doubts about the charge -- that Iraq sought to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore in Africa -- were "subsequent" to the Jan. 28 State of the Union speech in which Bush made the allegation. Defending the broader decision to go to war with Iraq, the president said the decision was made after he gave Saddam Hussein "a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."

Bush's position was at odds with those of his own aides, who acknowledged over the weekend that the CIA raised doubts that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger more than four months before Bush's speech.

The president's assertion that the war began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring: Hussein had, in fact, admitted the inspectors and Bush had opposed extending their work because he did not believe them effective. . . .

The president's remarks yesterday came as evidence emerged that the administration had information that seemed to guarantee that Iraq probably could not acquire nuclear material from Niger. A four-star general, who was asked to go to Niger last year to inquire about the security of Niger's uranium, told The Washington Post yesterday that he came away convinced the country's stocks were secure. The findings of Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr. were passed up to Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- though it was unclear whether they reached officials in the White House.

A spokesman for Myers said last night that the general has "no recollection of the information" but did not doubt that it had been forwarded to him. "Given the time frame of 16 months ago, information concerning Iraq not obtaining uranium from Niger would not have been as pressing as other subjects," said Capt. Frank Thorp, the chairman's spokesman. . . .

Fulford's impressions, while not conclusive, were similar to those of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who traveled to Niger for the CIA in February 2002 to interview Niger officials about the uranium claim and came away convinced it was not true.

Linguists note that the question, "Who lied in George Bush's State of the Union speech" bears a certain resemblance to the famous conundrum, "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?" They speculate that the two questions may have parallel answers.

After I wrote a month ago about the Niger uranium hoax in the State of the Union address, a senior White House official chided me gently and explained that there was more to the story that I didn't know.

Yup. And now it's coming out.

Based on conversations with people in the intelligence community, this picture is emerging: the White House, eager to spice up the State of the Union address, recklessly resurrected the discredited Niger tidbit. The Central Intelligence Agency objected, and then it and the National Security Council negotiated a new wording, attributing it all to the Brits. It felt less dishonest pinning the falsehood on the cousins.

What troubles me is not that single episode, but the broader pattern of dishonesty and delusion that helped get us into the Iraq mess -- and that created the false expectations undermining our occupation today. Some in the administration are trying to make George Tenet the scapegoat for the affair. But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney's resignation.

Condi Rice says she first learned of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's fact-finding trip to Niger during a TV interview, presumably when George Stephanopoulos asked her on "This Week" on June 8 about a column by me describing the trip. (Condi, you're breaking my heart -- you didn't read that column itself? How about if I fax you copies of everything I write, so you don't miss any, and you fax me everything you write?)

WASHINGTON -- The CIA's decision to send retired diplomat Joseph C. Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate possible Iraqi purchases of uranium was made routinely at a low level without Director George Tenet's knowledge. Remarkably, this produced a political firestorm that has not yet subsided.

Wilson's report that an Iraqi purchase of uranium yellowcake from Niger was highly unlikely was regarded by the CIA as less than definitive, and it is doubtful Tenet ever saw it. Certainly, President Bush did not, prior to his 2003 State of the Union address, when he attributed reports of attempted uranium purchases to the British government. That the British relied on forged documents made Wilson's mission, nearly a year earlier, the basis of furious Democratic accusations of burying intelligence though the report was forgotten by the time the president spoke.

Reluctance at the White House to admit a mistake has led Democrats ever closer to saying the president lied the country into war. Even after a belated admission of error last Monday, finger-pointing between Bush administration agencies continued. Messages between Washington and the presidential entourage traveling in Africa hashed over the mission to Niger.

Wilson's mission was created after an early 2002 report by the Italian intelligence service about attempted uranium purchases from Niger, derived from forged documents prepared by what the CIA calls a "con man." This misinformation, peddled by Italian journalists, spread through the U.S. government. The White House, State Department and Pentagon, and not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it.

That's where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein's wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed "the stuff of heroism." President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998.

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.

Other statements about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program should not be buried in the Niger flap. Many of those claims, although not quite as clear-cut, appear to have been exaggerated. They raise broader questions about the competence of the CIA and about the pressures exerted on the agency.

The most sweeping assessment of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's intentions was contained in October's CIA report "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction." In it, the CIA made a number of allegations about Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic missile programs. The key judgments:

• If left unchecked, Baghdad would probably have a nuclear weapon this decade. If it got enough "fissile material," i.e. uranium, it could build a bomb "within a year."
• Baghdad had begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents, including mustard, sarin and VX gases.
• Every aspect of Hussein's biological weapons programs was "active and most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War."
• Baghdad was developing missiles capable of delivering weapons payloads, including biological agents, to other nations.

Today, on its Web site, the best the agency can muster is a few pictures of suspected mobile weapons labs. Given this paucity, the jump in the level of CIA alarm from 2001 to 2002 is puzzling. In 2001's report, the CIA told Congress: "We believe that Iraq has probably continued at least low-level theoretical [research and development] associated with its nuclear program." The 2001 report also said "we are concerned that Iraq may again be producing [biological weapons] agents." Last year, the assertion of such a program was categorical.

The CIA was right to be concerned about Iraq's intentions, but in 2001 it was not describing an imminent threat to U.S. security. It is far from clear that Congress or ordinary Americans, not to mention the British government, would have supported war to oust a nasty dictator. That is the administration's real problem.

The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region. I firmly believe the decisions we made will make America more secure and the world more peaceful.

Top Bush administration officials are not winning their frantic battle to close off the escalating debate about how and why a bogus claim about the so-called "imminent" danger posed by Iraq's nuclear program got into the nation's most important annual presidential speech. They had counted on the furor to subside after CIA director George Tenet took the blame. But, as Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska wryly observed, "This was not a one-man show." High-ranking foreign policy advisers had the power to pressure Tenet and many deeply troubling questions about their roles remain unanswered. The administration's evasions, shifting rationales, obfuscations and attempted distractions suggest that the credibility problem originates at a very high level - national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney or all three. The president has not taken responsibility nor apologized for including misleading material in his speech. Instead he tried to pass the buck to Tenet, who had actually objected to making the dubious claim but was persuaded to accept a technical change in the wording.

For his part, Bush was incoherent Monday about his own decision-making process. He claimed there were no doubts about the alleged Iraqi effort to purchase uranium prior to his speech and that his decision to invade was made not because of worry over nuclear weapons but because he had given Saddam Hussein "a chance to let inspectors in and he would not let them in." Neither assertion is true. . . .

In the current confusion, all the participants but one have defended the war, often giving conflicting accounts of what happened. Only Cheney has gone underground again. He has had nothing to say. Before the war, by contrast, he was one of the most forceful hawks warning that Hussein was such a danger "time is not on our side."

Large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons probably do not exist in Iraq, and prewar intelligence reports were "assumptions" based on "fragmentary information", the Bush Administration's own chief weapons inspector in Baghdad has conceded.

David Kay, appointed by the CIA to lead the US search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, told leaders of the House Intelligence Committee that only "bits of evidence" about WMD programmes were slowly emerging.

The former UN weapons inspector's comments increased the political pressure on the White House as the controversy grew over President Bush's prewar claims.

The committee's Republican and Democrat leaders, who disclosed Dr Kay's assessment in a report on their recent trip to Iraq, are to hold a public hearing next week into allegations that prewar intelligence was manipulated. . . .

The State of the Union speech was not a "one-man show", Chuck Hagel, a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said.

"There's a cloud hanging over this Administration," he said, adding that Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush's National Security Adviser, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, and Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, were all involved in decisions on intelligence. He said that Americans needed to know: did the US base its reasoning for war on "faulty intelligence or abused intelligence?" Arlen Specter, another Republican senator, also questioned White House attempts to blame Mr Tenet. "As President Harry S. Truman said, 'The buck stops with the President of the United States'," he said. A CBS News poll indicated that 56 per cent of Americans now believe that the Administration lied or concealed elements of what it knew about Iraq's weapons.

The U.S. military's new commander in Iraq acknowledged for the first time yesterday that American troops are engaged in a "classical guerrilla-type" war against remnants of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and said Baathist attacks are growing in organization and sophistication.

The statements by Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, in his first Pentagon briefing since taking charge of the U.S. Central Command last week, were in sharp contrast with earlier statements by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. . . .

Abizaid offered an expansive and troubling assessment of conditions on the ground in Iraq. In addition to the guerrilla campaign being waged by the Baathists, he cited a resurgence of Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist group the State Department says is tied to al Qaeda, and the appearance of either al Qaeda or al Qaeda "look-alike" fighters on the battlefield.

The Baathist attacks, most troubling to U.S. forces, he said, are being staged by former mid-level Iraqi intelligence officials and Special Republican Guard personnel, who have organized cells at the regional level and demonstrated the ability to attack U.S. personnel with improvised explosives and tactical maneuvers.

These Iraqi forces, Abizaid said, "are conducting what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us. It's low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it's war however you describe it."

Abizaid's remarks were in sharp contrast to those of Rumsfeld, his boss, who insisted from the same lectern 21/2 weeks ago that the U.S. military was not involved in a guerrilla war and who said as recently as Sunday on ABC News that the fighting in Iraq did not fit the definition of guerrilla war.

While Rumsfeld said that he did not have any good evidence that the Iraqi attacks were being coordinated at the regional level, Abizaid said yesterday that there is regional organization and that it is possible that these regional organizations could become connected throughout the country.

CIA Director George J. Tenet told the Senate intelligence committee yesterday that his staff did not bring to his attention a questionable statement about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa before President Bush delivered his State of the Union address.

But Tenet told the senators during a nearly five-hour session behind closed doors that he takes responsibility for the now-famous 16-word sentence in the speech because an agency official had approved it after negotiations with the White House, according to congressional and administration sources who attended the session.

"Members were stunned," one Democratic senator in the meeting said, "because he said he basically wasn't aware of the sentence until recently." . . .

Yesterday's session was originally scheduled to permit Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) to pursue with the CIA director whether the agency had supplied U.N. weapons inspectors adequate information about possible weapons sites in Iraq; those questions took up nearly one hour of the meeting, congressional sources said. Levin has said that the number of key sites listed in CIA documents far exceeded the number given to chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, though Tenet has publicly testified that all the major ones had been given.

In recent days, as the Bush administration has defended its assertion in the president's State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium, officials have said it was only one bit of intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.

But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.

By Jan. 28, in fact, the intelligence report concerning Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa -- although now almost entirely disproved -- was the only publicly unchallenged element of the administration's case that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program. That may explain why the administration strived to keep the information in the speech and attribute it to the British, even though the CIA had challenged it earlier.

According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.

The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.

The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war. . . .

The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results.

Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title. . . .

Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise. . . .

The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.

Of the nine main conclusions in the British government document "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction", not one has been shown to be conclusively true. . . .

The nine main conclusions and the broad evidence which has emerged about them are these:

1. "Iraq has a useable chemical and biological weapons capability which has included recent production of chemical and biological agents."

No evidence of Iraq's useable capability has been found in terms of manufacturing plants, bombs, rockets or actual chemical or biological agents, nor any sign of recent production.

A mysterious truck has been found which the CIA says is a mobile biological facility but this has not been accepted by all experts.

2. "Saddam continues to attach great importance to the possession of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles... He is determined to retain these capabilities."

He may well have attached great importance to the possession of such weapons but none has been found. The meaning of the word "capability" is now key to this.

If the US and UK governments can show that Iraq maintained an active expertise, amounting to a "programme", they will claim their case has been made that Iraq violated UN resolutions.

3. "Iraq can deliver chemical and biological agents using an extensive range of shells, bombs, sprayers and missiles."

Nothing major has been found so far. There was one aircraft adapted with a sprayer but its capability was small.

4. "Iraq continues to work on developing nuclear weapons... Uranium has been sought from Africa."

The UN watchdog the IAEA said there was no evidence for this up to the start of the war and none has been found since. It is possible, though, that a case could be made from a shopping list of items needed for such a programme.

These include vacuum pumps, magnets, winding and balancing machines - all listed in the British dossier. No details about these purchasing attempts have been provided.

A claim that aluminium tubes were sought for this process was not wholly accepted by the British assessment though it was by the American and has subsequently not been proved.

The uranium claim is currently under question, though the British Government stands by its allegation.

5. "Iraq possesses extended-range versions of the Scud ballistic missile."

No Scuds have been found. The British said Iraq might have up to 20, the CIA said up to 12.

6. "Iraq's current military planning specifically envisages the use of chemical and biological weapons."

That may have been the case but direct evidence from serving Iraqi officers will be needed to prove it.

7. "The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons (chemical and biological) within 45 minutes of a decision to do so."

The 45 minute claim is currently under question. It is said to come from "a single source" probably a defector or Iraqi officer. It has not been proven.

8. "Iraq... is already taking steps to conceal and disperse sensitive equipment."

This is a focus of the current American and British investigation being carried out in Iraq by the Iraq Survey Group. One Iraqi scientist has come forward to say that he hid blueprints of centrifuges under his roses but that was in 1991.

If a pattern of concealment can be established, it would add to the credibility of the allegations that Iraq wanted to defy the UN.

9. "Iraq's chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missile programme are well funded."

Evidence will be needed from serving Iraqi officials backed up by documents. Again, if a pattern of funding can be established, a case against Iraq could be made but if the actual programmes did not exist, was the funding of much use and in any case, how much was it?

Now is not the time to stand back timidly hoping it will work out well in the end. The population of Baghdad is broiling through the 115-degree summer without electricity or water for much of the time. Given the background poverty and generally hideous conditions, the place is a major riot waiting to happen.

As we have known ever since the Kerner Commission Report, all it takes is a couple of bad policing incidents to set one off. It is more than painfully apparent that the Pentagon did somewhere between inadequate to zero planning for the occupation, despite the equally apparent fact that this war was settled on more than a year in advance and then intelligence was bent to support it.

Hugh Parmer (formerly of Fort Worth), head of the American Refugee Committee (ARC), was in Iran and Iraq at the beginning of the summer, the first NGO (non-governmental organization) to go in because ARC had privately funded relief supplies. He was fairly shaken by what he found.

Among other things, the crack disaster-relief team he had created while he was with USAID under President Clinton was sitting around filing their fingernails because the military was rejecting all advice from civilians in favor of doing it their way. Since the military is in this mess precisely because it is not well-trained at peacekeeping, you'd think it'd have enough sense to ask people who've been there and done that. That would include the United Nations and NATO.

Faced with mounting casualties and costs, the Bush administration said Wednesday that it was talking with foreign leaders about broadening U.N. authority in Iraq, even as a key commander said the Pentagon would extend the tours of war-weary U.S. troops to a full year to fight what has become a guerrilla war.

Until now, the administration has sought to limit U.N. activities in Iraq to humanitarian relief and has sought assistance from other countries on a nation-by-nation basis. A U.S. decision to go back to the United Nations would mark a fundamental shift in an approach that now gives the United States full control — and blame — for whatever happens in the volatile country. . . .

Some U.S. lawmakers and foreign policy experts have been predicting that the challenges of the mission would lead the United States to make an about-face, and grant the United Nations a greater role.

The United States military is now spending about $3.9 billion a month in Iraq, and more than $800 million a month in Afghanistan. If casualty rates continue, the U.S. will soon have lost more soldiers since major military operations ended May 1 than it did in the period before.

"I think this ultimately will end up with peacekeeping forces out there under a United Nations mandate, which will necessitate a larger U.N. role in the political process too," said Nancy Soderberg, a vice president of the consulting firm International Crisis Group in New York and a former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration.

One senior Senate aide said the proposal to draw in the United Nations certainly had support within the State Department and might also have some support from Pentagon officials who might "be looking for an exit strategy" from Iraq.

Democratic lawmakers have been making ever-louder demands that the administration turn to the United Nations, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for help in the rebuilding effort. . . .

In his remarks, Powell said that "there are some nations who have expressed the desire for more of a mandate from the United Nations, and I am in conversations with some ministers about this."

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in an appearance in New York, said the question was "not just an issue for Germany and France. Other nations are grappling with the issue, and the question has been posed as to whether or not Security Council action could improve the situation."

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION projected yesterday that the federal budget deficit will reach a stomach-churning $455 billion this year and $475 billion in fiscal 2004; the sad part is, as terrifyingly large as those numbers sound, that's not the worst of it. Even scarier than the deficits this year and next, and even more troubling for the country's long-term economic health, is that large deficits appear here to stay -- sapping the economy and piling on debt that will have to be paid by generations to come.

Just two years ago, the administration was projecting a surplus of $334 billion for this fiscal year. In February, the administration estimated that this year's deficit would be a "mere" $304 billion; the new estimate is 50 percent higher. In explaining how things deteriorated so quickly, the Bush administration and its allies point fingers in various directions -- the recession, the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, the cost of the war in Iraq -- and all of these contain a significant element of truth. In particular, the lagging economy has resulted in a dramatic falloff in tax receipts that, according to the Office of Management and Budget, accounts for more than half of this year's shortfall. But this omits a major culprit: the administration's reckless tax cuts. As OMB itself estimates, these account for 23 percent of the change since its 2001 projection, or $177 billion. In other words, without the tax cuts, the deficit this year would be $278 billion. The new OMB director, Joshua B. Bolten, said yesterday that the tax cuts were "not the problem," but "part of the solution." Some of the cuts may have provided a short-term boost, but the long-term price is far too high.

How bad are these deficits? The administration argues that, viewed in historical terms, the deficit is not that big. "A legitimate subject of concern," Mr. Bolten said. During the Reagan administration, the deficit hit a record 6 percent of gross domestic product; the administration points out that this year's projection would be 4.2 percent of GDP. But if the Social Security surplus isn't included in the calculation, the deficit will be $614 billion, or 5.6 percent of GDP. In addition, the deficit could be worse than the administration projects; for one thing, its figures don't include the costs of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, running at about $5 billion a month.

The far bigger problems, though, are down the road. The administration projects that things will improve dramatically after the next two years, with deficits dropping to 1.7 percent of GDP by 2008. These figures benefit from projected spending levels that other budget experts see as entirely unrealistic. Moreover, this analysis ignores costs that will kick in later. The administration's projections conveniently cut off in 2008, before many of the costs of the tax cuts start to pile up -- especially if the administration gets its way and the supposedly temporary cuts are made permanent. Its projections also ignore the cost of fixing the alternative minimum tax, and the larger problem of dealing with Social Security and Medicare. Mr. Bolten's former colleagues at Goldman Sachs project deficits totaling $4.5 trillion over the next decade.

The Concord Coalition had it right in a report released just before these awful new numbers. The current approach, it said, "goes a step beyond deficits caused by understandable temporary factors. It is a deliberate decision to risk deficits throughout the coming decade. And it comes despite the fact that the only plan for dealing with the fiscal pressure of the boomers' retirement in the following decade is to run even bigger deficits. This fiscally irresponsible policy rates a failing grade."