LONDON, July 18 The body of a man believed to be the arms expert at the center of a high-profile dispute over the validity of government weapons intelligence was found today near his home in Oxfordshire.

The weapons specialist's wife told the police shortly before midnight that her husband, Dr. David Kelly, 59, had been missing since he left his home Thursday afternoon saying he was going for a walk. The body was discovered this morning on a woodland footpath five miles from the Kelly residence in the village of Southmoor. . . .

An Oxford-educated, former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq with a speciality in biological weapons, Dr. Kelly faced tough questioning on Tuesday from the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. Lawmakers especially wanted to know whether he was the source of an accusation broadcast by the BBC that the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair had doctored intelligence findings in its campaign to gain public support for going to war in Iraq.

A soft-spoken civil servant in the Ministry of Defense accustomed to working behind the scenes, Dr. Kelly was repeatedly pressed by committee members to say whether he thought he was the "fall guy" in a bitter dispute that has pitted the government against the BBC and been front-page news in Britain during the last week.

The implication of the badgering questions was that the scientist had been set up by Mr. Blair's powerful communications and security director, Alastair Campbell, and the Ministry of Defense to counter damaging reports by the BBC about possible government manipulation of intelligence. . . .

Dr. Kelly, whose title was senior adviser on weapons of mass destruction, may have unwittingly become caught up in a political firestorm for which his experience as an acknowledged authority on bioterrorism had not prepared him. . . .

Tom Mangold, a journalist for the British news network ITV and a close friend of Dr. Kelly's, said that he spoke this morning to the scientist's wife, Janice, and that she had said that her husband was "very, very angry about what had happened at the committee" on Tuesday.

"She didn't use the word `depressed,' " Mr. Mangold said, "but she said he was very, very stressed and unhappy about what had happened and this was really not the kind of world he wanted to live in."

The case that put Dr. Kelly in the public eye arose from a BBC report on May 29 asserting that a high-ranking Downing Street official had "sexed up" a government intelligence dossier by inserting a claim that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed in 45 minutes.

The BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, who covers military affairs, said the insertion had been made against the wishes of intelligence agencies. The weapons claim was the highlight of the dossier published by the government to persuade a dubious British public of the need to take immediate military action in Iraq.

Mr. Gilligan attributed his account to a senior weapons scientist with whom he had met at a downtown London hotel. The reporter did not identify the scientist or the high-ranking Downing Street official on the air, but he later wrote in a newspaper article that the official who had "sexed up" the dossier was Mr. Campbell.

Mr. Campbell reacted with fury and challenged Mr. Gilligan to produce the source of the accusation against him. Mr. Campbell collected denials from the intelligence agencies involved, demanded an apology from the BBC and gave televised testimony before the same committee that later was to hear from Dr. Kelly.

When Dr. Kelly originally volunteered to Defense Ministry managers in early July that he had met with Mr. Gilligan at a downtown hotel on May 22, Mr. Campbell seized the opportunity to challenge the BBC to say whether or not he was Mr. Gilligan's source for the report.

The BBC refused, citing its practice of not identifying people who provide information on the condition of anonymity. Mr. Campbell retorted that Dr. Kelly himself had withdrawn the request, thus eliminating the need for the BBC to continue to remain confidential.

The foreign affairs committee then invited Dr. Kelly to testify, and he appeared on Tuesday, telling its members that he did not believe that he was the "main source" for the BBC story.

As a witness, Dr. Kelly sat hunched over the desk in front of him, looking troubled and uncomfortable under the pointed questioning of members of the parliamentary panel. On several occasions, lawmakers asked him to raise his voice so they could hear his responses.

"I reckon you're the chaff thrown up to divert our probing," Andrew Mackinlay, a Labor Party member, asked Dr. Kelly as the scientist squirmed in the witness chair. "Have you ever felt like the fall guy? I mean, you've been set up, haven't you?"

Dr. Kelly said quietly that he was in no position to answer the question.

Sir John Stanley, a Conservative, said, "You were being exploited to rubbish Gilligan and his source, quite clearly."

Dr. Kelly replied, "I've just found myself in this position out of my own honesty of acknowledging that fact that I had interacted with him."

Donald Anderson, the chairman of the committee, said today that he did not believe the questioning to have been overly aggressive. "I concede, of course," he told reporters, "it was wholly outside his normal experience, therefore must have certainly been an ordeal for him."

Richard Ottaway, another committee Conservative, said: "There are games going on here, there are people trying to make points, trying to shut down avenues of inquiry, trying to open up things. But putting up Dr. Kelly was just part of the distraction, and it's had the most ghastly result, and I am deeply critical of those involved."

On Thursday, Mr. Gilligan, the BBC reporter, appeared before the committee for the second time, and afterward Mr. Anderson read a statement calling him an "unsatisfactory witness" and accusing him of changing his story from his first appearance. Mr. Gilligan denied the charge and called the committee a "hanging jury".

The Ministry of Defense said it would hold an independent judicial inquiry into the circumstances of Dr. Kelly's death, but the government showed no signs tonight of bowing to the growing demands from members of Parliament for a full-scale independent judicial look into the whole issue of weapons intelligence.

Since the fall of Baghdad on April 9, U.S. and British troops have struggled to bring order from chaos. Water, electricity and security are in short supply, fueling resentment among many Iraqis. A guerrilla-like resistance has taken shape against the occupation; U.S. casualties mount almost daily in an operation that is costing nearly $4 billion a month and stalling the withdrawal of American forces.

The Bush administration planned well and won the war with minimal allied casualties. Now, according to interviews with dozens of administration officials, military leaders and independent analysts, missteps in the planning for the subsequent peace could threaten the lives of soldiers and drain U.S. resources indefinitely and cloud the victory itself. . . .

As Bremer now struggles to normalize Iraq amid rising violence and the destabilizing likelihood that Saddam Hussein is still alive, Rumsfeld and other administration officials have taken to pointing out the chaos that has followed similar events in other countries, including the American Revolution.

Critics say that is all the more reason to be ready for the worst.

"It's not true there wasn't adequate planning. There was a volume of planning. More than the Clinton administration did for any of its interventions," said Rand's [James] Dobbins.

"They planned on an unrealistic set of assumptions," he said. "Clearly, in retrospect, they should have anticipated that when the old regime collapsed, there would be a period of disorder, a vacuum of power.... They should have anticipated extremist elements would seek to fill this vacuum of power. All of these in one form or another have been replicated in previous such experiences, and it was reasonable to plan for them."

Looking back from the third floor of the Pentagon, [Douglas] Feith dismissed such criticism as "simplistic." Despite initial problems, he said, progress is being made, with order returning to most of the country and a new Iraqi governing council in place.

Still, he and other Pentagon officials said, they are studying the lessons of Iraq closely ? to ensure that the next U.S. takeover of a foreign country goes more smoothly.

"We're going to get better over time," promised Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Rumsfeld. "We've always thought of post-hostilities as a phase" distinct from combat, he said. "The future of war is that these things are going to be much more of a continuum....

"This is the future for the world we're in at the moment," he said. "We'll get better as we do it more often."

An intelligence assessment last October cites "compelling evidence" that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute a nuclear-weapons program, according to documents released Friday by the White House.

Mounting a campaign to counter criticism that it used flawed intelligence to justify war with Iraq, the White House made public excerpts of the intelligence community's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. That report helped shaped now-challenged comments by President Bush in his State of the Union address that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium in Africa.

The report asserts that Baghdad "if left unchecked...probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

It also cites unsubstantiated reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from three African countries: Niger, Somalia and "possibly" Congo.

The White House sought to bolster its case as U.S. officials said that documents alleging Iraq sought uranium from Africa were obtained months before Bush cited them in making his case for war. But intelligence analysts did not look at them closely enough to know they were forgeries until after Bush had made the claim, U.S. officials say.

Bush in his State of the Union address in January asserted that, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

However, while the British government has stood by the assertion, U.S. officials, including CIA Director George Tenet, have subsequently challenged the allegation -- which was based at least in part on forged documents -- and have said it should not have been included in Bush's speech.

The intelligence assessment is put together by all the agencies in the intelligence community, with the CIA overseeing the presentation of the report. . . .

The material released by the White House also included a "footnote" by the State Department that said "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are...highly dubious."

On Thursday, U.S. officials offered new information which suggested a disconnect between the CIA and the State Department over the handling of what turned out to be a crucial but faulty piece of intelligence -- the forged documents -- used to make the Bush administration's case for war.

Officials acknowledged that had U.S. intelligence analyzed the documents sooner, they could have discovered the forgeries before the information was used as fodder for Bush administration statements vilifying Iraq.

The State Department said it obtained the documents in the fall of 2002, but intelligence officials said the CIA didn't get them until the following February. The State Department said it made them available to other agencies in the government shortly after acquiring them; officials could not explain why the CIA did not get copies of them sooner.

The U.S. Embassy in Rome obtained the documents, which purported to show contacts between officials in Iraq and Niger over the transfer of uranium, from a journalist there in October 2002, officials said. They were shown to CIA personnel in Rome and sent to State Department headquarters in Washington. But the CIA's station in Rome did not forward them to CIA headquarters outside Washington, where they would have been analyzed.

"We acquired the documents in October 2002 and they were shared widely within the U.S. government, with all the appropriate agencies," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. Those agencies included the CIA, another U.S. official said.

But an intelligence official said the CIA didn't obtain the documents from the State Department until February 2003. The official suggested analyzing the documents was not a top priority at the time because the CIA had already investigated their substance.

The CIA only got the documents to respond to a request from the United Nations, the intelligence official said. U.N. officials, trying to run a weapons inspections regime in Iraq, asked for evidence behind the allegation in Bush's Jan. 28 speech that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The CIA provided them to the United Nations. U.N. officials announced in early March the documents were fakes, and the CIA concurred, the intelligence official said.

The Italian government, which also obtained a copy of the documents, had passed on their contents -- but not their source -- to the CIA several months earlier. The CIA had sent a retired diplomat to Africa to investigate but found little to substantiate the claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.

Still, the CIA included the claim, with a note that it was unconfirmed, in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the classified document that summarized information on Iraq's weapons programs.

The estimate also noted the U.S. government had other, "fragmentary" intelligence suggesting that Iraq sought uranium for its nuclear weapons program in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Despite the uncertainties, Bush administration officials tried repeatedly to use this information in speeches and statements. The CIA protested several times as the statements were being prepared, but the Niger claim made it into a State Department fact sheet in December, and the more general Africa claim was used in the president's State of the Union address.

The State Department received copies of what would turn out to be forged documents suggesting that Iraq tried to purchase uranium oxide from Niger three months before the president's State of the Union address, administration officials said.

The documents, which officials said appeared to be of "dubious authenticity," were distributed to the CIA and other agencies within days. But the U.S. government waited four months to turn them over to United Nations weapons inspectors who had been demanding to see evidence of U.S. and British claims that Iraq's attempted purchase of uranium oxide violated U.N. resolutions and was among the reasons to go to war. State Department officials could not say yesterday why they did not turn over the documents when the inspectors asked for them in December.

The administration, facing increased criticism over the claims it made about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium, had said until now that it did not have the documents before the State of the Union speech.

Even before these documents arrived, both the State Department and the CIA had questions about the reliability of intelligence reports that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger and other African countries.

Beginning in October, the CIA warned the administration not to use the Niger claim in public. CIA Director George J. Tenet personally persuaded deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley to omit it from President Bush's Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

But on the eve of Bush's Jan. 28 State of the Union address, Robert Joseph, an assistant to the president in charge of nonproliferation at the National Security Council (NSC), initially asked the CIA if the allegation that Iraq sought to purchase 500 pounds of uranium from Niger could be included in the presidential speech.

Alan Foley, a senior CIA official, disclosed this detail when he accompanied Tenet in a closed-door hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday.

Foley, director of the CIA's intelligence, nonproliferation and arms control center, told committee members that the controversial 16-word sentence was eventually suggested by Joseph in a telephone conversation just a day or two before the speech, according to congressional and administration sources who were present at the five-hour session.

At the hearing, Foley said he called Joseph to object to mentioning Niger and that a specific amount of uranium was being sought. Joseph agreed to eliminate those two elements but then proposed that the speech use more general language, citing British intelligence that said Iraq had recently been seeking uranium in Africa.

Foley said he told Joseph that the CIA had objected months earlier to the British including that in their published September dossier because of the weakness of the U.S. information. But Foley said the British had gone ahead based on their own information.

When Foley first began answering questions on who from the White House staff sought to put the uranium charge in the State of the Union address, he did not mention Joseph's name, referring only to "a person" at the NSC. It was only after Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and several other senators demanded the name that he identified him.

A senior administration official said yesterday the only conversation that took place was about the classification of the source of the alleged uranium transaction. The question was whether to attribute the alleged transaction to a classified U.S. intelligence estimate or to a published British dossier and, he said, it was "agreed to use the British."

However, there are six other references to information carried in the U.S. estimate, and they are attributed to "U.S. intelligence" or "intelligence sources."

Both the Senate committee and the White House have begun internal discussions over how to handle the potentially delicate task of questioning presidential aides as part of a congressional investigation. Claims of executive privilege have in the past increased public interest and complicated the process of calling on White House aides to testify.

Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said Wednesday night: "We will take this where it leads us. We'll let the chips fall where they may." A senior congressional aide said Roberts is prepared to seek a way to question Joseph and any other White House aides.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), the ranking Democrat on the panel, said yesterday: "The intelligence committee has crossed that line . . . and we are looking at people in the executive branch, including the White House." He said that both Republicans and Democrats are concerned "about the further implication beyond Tenet." . . .

On Feb. 4, the U.N. inspectors' Iraq team was called to the U.S. mission in Vienna and verbally briefed on the contents of the documents. A day later, they received copies, according to officials familiar with the inspectors' work.

Using the Google Internet search engine, books on Niger and interviews with Iraqi and Nigerien officials, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts determined that the documents were fake.

On March 7, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei announced they were forged. It is not yet known who created the forgeries.

One of the fundamental differences between genuine democracies and totalitarian regimes is a free press.

For a free press to operate effectively, governments must accept that their decisions and policies will be challenged, interrogated, investigated and analysed by people acting independently and using whatever legal means are available to them. It can be desperately uncomfortable, and sometimes even unfair. Very occasionally, as for Richard Nixon over Watergate, it can be politically fatal. But the alternative is far worse.

The case of David Kelly, the Ministry of Defence weapons expert who ministers "outed" as the source of Andrew Gilligan's story that the government exaggerated Iraq's weapons capability, raises crucial questions about the operation of a free press and the relationship between government and journalists.

There is no question that Gilligan's report for the BBC's Today programme was explosive. There is no question that it made the government's position uncomfortable - perhaps even untenable - on the reasons for going to war. And there is no question that Alastair Campbell, in particular, was apoplectic about the allegations being made. . . .

Every politician and every journalist knows the rules: it is axiomatic to the operation of a free press that no journalist will ever name their source, because the vast majority of information would dry up if there was any risk of exposure.

In issues such as defence and security, where sources are usually in breach of the Official Secrets Act, no one would talk. Governments would be free to spend money corruptly, take ill-judged decisions or implement undemocratic policies without fear of public scrutiny.

In defence and security matters, more than any other area of public reporting, the source/journalist relationship is central to this democratic process of scrutiny and interrogation. Alastair Campbell, a journalist, knows that better than anyone. So do defence secretary Geoff Hoon and prime minister Tony Blair.

Their public calls for the BBC to cofirm or deny that Dr Kelly was their source were not just a disingenuous attempt to ignore the rules; they were a deliberate, disgraceful attempt to undermine the foundations of genuine journalistic inquiry in a desperate pitch to shore up their own credibility.

In the light of what has happened, BBC journalists may be asking themselves whether they should have behaved differently. It is hard to see how. The nature of their investigation goes to the heart of how a free press should operate independently and in the public interest.

The government, however, cannot be let off the hook. It has demonstrated a profound contempt for the most basic conventions governing relationships between press and politicians. It is possible that, as a result, a man has died.

President Bush and his national security adviser did not entirely read the most authoritative prewar assessment of U.S. intelligence on Iraq, including a State Department claim that an allegation Bush would later use in his State of the Union address was "highly dubious," White House officials said yesterday.

The acknowledgment came in a briefing for reporters in which the administration released excerpts from last October's National Intelligence Estimate, a classified, 90-page summary that was the definitive assessment of Iraq's weapons programs by U.S. intelligence agencies. The report declared that "most" of the six intelligence agencies believed there was "compelling evidence that Saddam [Hussein] is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort for Baghdad's nuclear weapons program." But the document also included a pointed dissent by the State Department, which said the evidence did not "add up to a compelling case" that Iraq was making a comprehensive effort to get nuclear weapons. . . . A senior administration official who briefed reporters yesterday said neither Bush nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice read the NIE in its entirety. "They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document," said the official, referring to the "Annex" that contained the State Department's dissent. The official conducting the briefing rejected reporters' entreaties to allow his name to be used, arguing that it was his standard procedure for such sessions to be conducted anonymously.

The official said Bush was "briefed" on the NIE's contents, but "I don't think he sat down over a long weekend and read every word of it." Asked whether Bush was aware the State Department called the Africa-uranium claim "highly dubious," the official, who coordinated Bush's State of the Union address, said: "He did not know that."

"The president was comfortable at the time, based on the information that was provided in his speech," the official said of the decision to use it in the address to Congress. "The president of the United States is not a fact-checker."

It is becoming increasingly clear that, at some point, the United Nations will have to take over the postwar reconstruction of Iraq. The only question is whether Kofi Annan ends up rushing in on his own terms to fill the gaps of a desperately overwhelmed American occupation force -- or whether President Bush comes to his senses, realizes that the task is much harder than his advisers had predicted, and admits that he can't manage it by himself. If he reaches this conclusion in six months or a year, it will look like a mortifying retreat; if he does so much sooner, like now, he might still be able to look courageous and wise. . . .

One of the year's saddest official documents is the U.S. Agency for International Development's "Vision for Post-Conflict Iraq," a 13-page internal policy memo, dated Feb. 19, 2003 (leaked a few weeks later to the Wall Street Journal), that, read in retrospect, exposes the administration's full naiveté. In addition to the fine-tuned calculations of what percentage of electricity, water, health care, and other amenities will be restored within a few days, 60 days, and six months after the war ends, the memo contains this poignant decree: "The national government will be limited to assume national functions, such as defense and security, monetary and fiscal matters, justice, foreign affairs, and strategic interests such as oil and gas," while local assemblies will handle all other matters "in an open, transparent and accountable manner."

Should we laugh or cry at this noble plan to mate Jefferson with Hamilton on the democratic breeding grounds of the New Mesopotamia? The remarkable thing about the passage is that not a single noun or adjective turns out to have any bearing on the current reality. "National government," "defense," "security," "fiscal matters," "justice," "foreign affairs" -- these concepts simply don't exist.

Another presumption going into the war was that, by this time, U.S. troop levels in Iraq would have been cut to 50,000. (The fighting would be over, and President Chalabi's militia fighters, transformed into the new Iraqi army, would have mopped up the remaining pockets of resistance.) This notion underlay the Pentagon's initial forecast that the monthly cost of occupation would now be $2 billion instead of, as it turns out, $3.9 billion.

The assumptions of America's postwar policy have crumbled, so it should be no surprise that the policy is on the verge of crumbling, too. Leaving is not a real option; it would be a hideous thing -- politically, strategically, and morally -- to wreck a nation, install an interim "governing council," then split.

But staying, at least under the current arrangement, isn't much of an option either. We can't afford its price, in money or lives. The longer the United States remains the dominant face of armed authority, the more the Iraqis will associate us with the continuing chaos, and thus the greater the chance that, once they do form their own government, anti-Americanism will be the thickest of threads that hold it together.

As political crises mount in Washington and London over evidence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, it would be especially useful to have the testimony of a leading expert on the subject, Saddam Hussein's science adviser, Amir Saadi.

Saadi (the seven of diamonds in the coalition's deck of cards) surrendered voluntarily to U.S. authorities in Baghdad on April 12. He was the first senior Iraqi official to do so. Because he had never been a member of the Baath Party, U.S. officials were hopeful that he would provide honest information.

TV addicts will remember Saadi as the articulate, cleanshaven English speaker who tried (never entirely convincingly, to this viewer) to explain Iraq's dealings with U.N. weapons inspectors. He was educated in Britain and Germany and married a foreigner, who was never allowed to live with him in Baghdad. Although he served as minister of petroleum and industries at various points, he was never particularly close to Hussein.

"He wanted to make himself available to the coalition forces for questioning and cooperation," said Saadi's German-born wife, Helma, in an e-mail message this week. One of Saadi's American supporters agrees: "He has everything to gain by being honest, and absolutely nothing to gain from continued deception."

So where has Saadi been for the past three months? His family believes he has been imprisoned at the Baghdad airport along with other Iraqi captives. His wife said that she has been communicating through the Red Cross and that in his last communication, on June 15, he told her he was "being treated correctly," was "allowed to shower once a week" and was passing the time reading and writing.

Saadi's friends say there has been quiet discussion about his case with the Coalition Provisional Authority headed by L. Paul Bremer. Believing that Saadi is "clean," some officials of the authority have recommended three times to higher officials at the Pentagon that he be released, according to Saadi's friends. Each of these requests has been rejected, they say.

But why muzzle Saadi? At a time when there are political firestorms in America and Britain over Iraq's WMD program, why not let one of Iraq's leading scientists answer questions? For example: When (if ever) were banned weapons destroyed? If they were destroyed, why didn't Iraq make a full disclosure, as demanded by the United Nations? Was Hussein afraid that if he admitted he had destroyed his WMD stockpile, he would lose a deterrent against attack by Kurdish and Shiite enemies of his regime? These are precisely the questions Saadi could help clarify.

Saadi's silence, I suspect, is evidence that the Pentagon and the White House have concluded that any public release of his testimony would undercut their position. After all, this White House is so desperate to protect President Bush on WMD issues that it is prepared to sacrifice CIA Director George Tenet. If Saadi's testimony could help the president, surely we would have heard it by now.

I have the same question about another man who voluntarily surrendered to the coalition, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. He turned himself in April 24 after several days of negotiation involving an Iraqi American intermediary in the United States.

Aziz in his later years was not an intimate of Hussein -- that's why he was only the eight of spades in the coalition's deck. But he knows things that would be relevant to the British and American publics. Like Saadi, he has little incentive at this point to lie. His family even wants him to publish his memoirs.

I spoke with his son, Ziad Aziz, yesterday from Amman. He said his only official contact from his father was a June 14 letter via the Red Cross saying he was in good health. The younger Aziz recalled that when he said goodbye in Baghdad, his father seemed ready to cooperate fully. He, too, might be able to tell the world important information, were he free to do so.

What's bothersome about these cases is that they reinforce the impression that the Bush administration has something to hide. Why not disclose the testimony of people the coalition worked so hard to catch? The only convincing explanation, argues a former CIA official, is that their accounts would "directly refute the Bush administration's insistence that WMD still exist somewhere -- an assertion that we all know is growing more questionable every day."

The solid rationale for this war was liberating Iraq from Hussein's brutal regime, rather than the shakier WMD evidence. How bizarre that Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair decided to play a weak hand and that they now keep doubling their bets as its weakness becomes more apparent.

During the run-up to the invasion on Iraq, while speaking at teach-ins and other forums and taking part in other anti-war activities, I was somewhat skeptical of those who argued that the war was simply about getting hold of Iraqi oil for American oil companies. I cringed a little at the slogans and placards that said "No blood for oil!" , "No war for oil!", etc., and disagreed with those that the attack was due to a simple quid pro quo between the administration and its oil company cronies. While I found the administration's case for war to be unbelievable, the 'war for oil' thesis seemed to me to be a far too simplistic approach to global politics.

I fancied my self to be a much more sophisticated geo-strategic analyst. Of course, the fact that Iraq had the world's second largest reserves could not be coincidental and definitely played a role in the war plans. But I thought it more likely that broader geopolitical concerns were more dominant, such as showing the world that the US had the power to enforce its will anywhere, and to establish a long-term and secure strategic base in the middle east from which to ensure dominance of the region. To the extent that oil played a role, I thought that purpose of the war was not mainly to divert Iraqi oil revenues to US companies but instead to ensure control over the oil flow to the rest of the world so that economic rivals such as Europe and Japan, whose economies were dependent on middle east oil, would be forced to be subservient to US global interests and pressure.

The thought that the war was actually about making money for individuals and corporations in the short term did not seem to me to be credible. That was too petty and crass.

That was why I was stunned to read the press release put out by the public interest group Judicial Watch on July 17, 2003. This organization, along with the Sierra Club, had argued that both the membership of the Energy Task Force chaired by Vice-President Cheney and the proceedings of its meetings should be made public and had sought the information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) since April 19, 2001. The Vice President had vigorously opposed this opening up of its activities and so a lawsuit was filed. On March 5, 2002 the US District Judge ordered the government to produce the documents, which was finally done by the Commerce Department just recently.

The Judicial Watch press release states that these released documents "contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available on the Internet at: www.JudicialWatch.org."

The press release continues: "The Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates (UAE) documents likewise feature a map of each country's oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supporting charts with details of the major oil and gas development projects in each country that provide information on the projects, costs, capacity, oil company and status or completion date."

The White House, in the run-up to war in Iraq, did not seek CIA approval before charging that Saddam Hussein could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes, administration officials now say.

The claim, which has since been discredited, was made twice by President Bush, in a September Rose Garden appearance after meeting with lawmakers and in a Saturday radio address the same week. Bush attributed the claim to the British government, but in a "Global Message" issued Sept. 26 and still on the White House Web site, the White House claimed, without attribution, that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given."

The 45-minute claim is at the center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent suicide on Friday of a British weapons scientist who had questioned the government's use of the allegation. The scientist, David Kelly, was being investigated by the British parliament as the suspected source of a BBC report that the 45-minute claim was added to Britain's public "dossier" on Iraq in September at the insistence of an aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair -- and against the wishes of British intelligence, which said the charge was from a single source and was considered unreliable.

The White House embraced the claim, from a British dossier on Iraq, at the same time it began to promote the dossier's disputed claim that Iraq sought uranium in Africa.

Bush administration officials last week said the CIA was not consulted about the claim. A senior White House official did not dispute that account, saying presidential remarks such as radio addresses are typically "circulated at the staff level" within the White House only.

Virtually all of the focus on whether Bush exaggerated intelligence about Iraq's weapons ambitions has been on the credibility of a claim he made in the Jan. 28 State of the Union address about efforts to buy uranium in Africa. But an examination of other presidential remarks, which received little if any scrutiny by intelligence agencies, indicates Bush made more broad accusations on other intelligence matters related to Iraq.

For example, the same Rose Garden speech and Sept. 28 radio address that mentioned the 45-minute accusation also included blunt assertions by Bush that "there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq." This claim was highly disputed among intelligence experts; a group called Ansar al-Islam in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, who could have been in Iraq, were both believed to have al Qaeda contacts but were not themselves part of al Qaeda.

Bush was more qualified in his major Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati, mentioning al Qaeda members who got training and medical treatment from Iraq. The State of the Union address was also more hedged about whether al Qaeda members were in Iraq, saying "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda."

Now would not be a bad time to start worrying. Tens of thousands of American troops will be in Iraq, perhaps for years, surrounded by Iraqis with guns. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says this is not a quagmire; I pray he is right. But the practical problems faced by the talented American administrator, L. Paul Bremer, and by U.S. soldiers trying to maintain order without a clear way of separating enemies from friends are daunting.

It would help greatly if we had more assistance from the international community, but in fairness, the war was an Anglo-American production; it's unlikely we will get substantial help without yielding significant authority, something the administration is loath to do. Meanwhile, U.S. credibility has been undermined by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and by the inclusion of dubious information in the president's State of the Union address. . . .

Overall, the outlook for preventing the spread of potentially destabilizing weapons systems is bleak. The administration, openly allergic to treaties and arms control, has made no effort to promote restraint in developing arms as a normative ethic to which all nations have an interest in adhering. Instead, it has decided to fight proliferation primarily through military means and threats. Is this adequate?

Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified recently that "new alliances" are pooling resources "to deter or offset U.S. military superiority." Globalization has made the technology and resources necessary to develop sophisticated weapons more widely available. "Some 25 countries," Jacoby warns, "possess or are actively pursuing WMD or missile programs. The threat to U.S. and allied interests will grow during the next decade." . . .

Three years ago, America had vast diplomatic capital based on the goodwill we enjoyed around the world, and vast financial capital based on our international economic leadership and a record budget surplus. Now our capital of all kinds has been dissipated and we are left with more intractable dilemmas than resources or friends.

As someone who has served in positions of responsibility, I know it is much harder to devise practical solutions from the inside than to offer theoretical solutions from the outside. The nature of today's world, not the Bush administration, is responsible for the majority of problems we face. I would be less concerned, however, if I thought the administration was learning as it went along -- learning how to attract broader international support for its policies, make better use of neglected diplomatic tools, share responsibility, be more careful with the truth, finish what it starts and devise economic policies consonant with America's global role.

The quickest way to a more effective national security policy is to acknowledge the need for improvement; until that happens, we will continue to slide backward toward ever more dangerous ground.

If Bush and his aides used information they knew to have been discredited in an attempt to win support for a war that has killed Americans and Iraqis, that has cost tens of billions of dollars and that may have locked the United States into a long-term position as the colonial overseer of a distant and troubled land, then this administration's wrongdoing is of far more consequence than Richard Nixon's misdeeds.

Nixon and his aides kept an "enemies list" and turned the White House into a command center for political dirty tricks. They then attempted to cover up their wrongdoing.

Those are serious crimes. But they don't compare with the seriousness of the charges against Bush. If the president deliberately led America into a deadly and costly war under false pretenses, then he has done the nation far more damage than Nixon. Says U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., "The nation's credibility, in my view, is at stake."

Considering the international outcry over the revelations regarding Bush, no one could seriously argue with Corzine's comment.

Yet last week the Republican-led Senate blocked Corzine's effort to establish a 12-member, bipartisan commission to investigate the use of intelligence during the prelude to the war. The 51-45 vote was one of several Iraq-related votes that broke pretty much along party lines last week. Every attempt by Democrats to get answers to questions about the prelude, execution, time line and cost of the war was blocked by Republicans who voted to protect their party's president.

The prioritization of partisanship over principle has been seen before. During the early days of the Watergate controversy, many Republicans in Congress attempted to stall investigations. Eventually, however, responsible Republicans began to break with their scandal-tarnished president. For the most part, Republicans who chose principle over party were rewarded by their constituents with re-election. Those who let partisanship trump statesmanship proved to be far more vulnerable on Election Day.

In making its case for war, the administration dismissed the arguments of experts who noted that despite some contacts between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden's followers over the years, there was no strong evidence of a substantive relationship. As members of the National Security Council staff from 1994 to 1999, we closely examined nearly a decade's worth of intelligence and we became convinced, like many of our colleagues in the intelligence community, that the religious radicals of Al Qaeda and the secularists of Baathist Iraq simply did not trust one another or share sufficiently compelling interests to work together.

But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised that the Bush administration had "bulletproof evidence" of a Qaeda-Iraq link, and Secretary of State Colin Powell made a similar case to the United Nations. Such claims now look as questionable as the allegation that Iraq was buying uranium in Niger.

In the 14 weeks since the fall of Baghdad, coalition forces have not brought to light any significant evidence demonstrating the bond between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Uncovering such a link should be much easier than finding weapons of mass destruction. Instead of having to inspect hundreds of suspected weapons sites around the country, military and intelligence officials need only comb through the files of Iraq's intelligence agency and a handful of other government ministries.

Our intelligence experts have been doing exactly that since April and so far there has been no report of any proof (and we can assume that any supporting information would have quickly been publicized). Of the more than 3,000 Qaeda operatives arrested around the world, only a handful of prisoners in Guantánamo ? all with an incentive to please their captors ? have claimed there was cooperation between Osama bin Laden's organization and Saddam Hussein's regime, and their remarks have yet to be confirmed by any of the high-ranking Iraqi officials now in American hands.

Indeed, most new reports concerning Al Qaeda and Iraq have been of another nature. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, the two highest-ranking Qaeda operatives in custody, have told investigators that Mr. bin Laden shunned cooperation with Saddam Hussein. A United Nations team investigating global ties of the bin Laden group reported last month that they found no evidence of a Qaeda-Iraq connection.

In addition, one Central Intelligence Agency official told The Washington Post that a review panel of retired intelligence operatives put together by the agency found that although there were some ties among individuals in the two camps, "it was not at all clear there was any coordination or joint activities." And Rand Beers, the senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council who resigned earlier this year, has said that on the basis of the intelligence he saw, he did not believe there was a significant relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The Congressional oversight committees evaluating the administration's use of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have said they will also examine whether the administration manipulated information regarding Iraq's involvement in terrorism. The terrorism issue must not be given short shrift because of the current controversy over claims of Iraq's unconventional weapons. The truth is, we knew for decades that Iraq had nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs ? yet it was only after 9/11 that these programs were viewed as an intolerable threat that necessitated a regime change.

American air war commanders carried out a comprehensive plan to disrupt Iraq's military command and control system before the Iraq war, according to an internal briefing on the conflict by the senior allied air war commander.

Known as Southern Focus, the plan called for attacks on the network of fiber-optic cable that Saddam Hussein's government used to transmit military communications, as well as airstrikes on key command centers, radars and other important military assets.

The strikes, which were conducted from mid-2002 into the first few months of 2003, were justified publicly at the time as a reaction to Iraqi violations of a no-flight zone that the United States and Britain established in southern Iraq. But Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the chief allied war commander, said the attacks also laid the foundations for the military campaign against the Baghdad government. . . .

After General Moseley assumed command toward the end of 2001, however, the American strategy began to change. General Moseley and General Franks believed that the American military needed a plan to weaken the Iraqi air defenses, initially because of the threat to the allied patrols and later to facilitate an offensive.

The first step was to use spy satellites, U-2 planes and reconnaissance drones to identify potential targets.

One major target was the network of fiber-optic cable that transmitted military communications between Baghdad and Basra and Baghdad and Nasiriya. The cables themselves were buried underground and impossible to locate. So the air war commanders focused on the "cable repeater stations," which relayed the signals. From June 2002 until the beginning of the Iraq war, the allies flew 21,736 sorties over southern Iraq and attacked 349 targets, including the cable stations.

"We were able to figure out that we were getting ahead of this guy and we were breaking them up faster than he could fix them," General Moseley said of the fiber-optic cables. "So then we were able to push it up a little bit and effectively break up the fiber-optic backbone from Baghdad to the south."

During that period before the war, American officials said the strikes were necessary because the Iraqis were shooting more often at allied air patrols. In total, the Iraqis fired on allied aircraft 651 times during the operation. But General Moseley said it was possible that the Iraqi attacks increased because allied planes had stepped up their patrols over Iraq. "We became a little more aggressive based on them shooting more at us, which allowed us to respond more," he said. "Then the question is whether they were shooting at us because we were up there more. So there is a chicken and egg thing here."

On paper, the Pentagon's plan for finding Iraq's unconventional weapons was bold and original.

Four mobile exploitation teams, or MET's, each composed of about 25 soldiers, scientists and weapons experts from several Pentagon agencies, would fan out to chase tips from survey units and combat forces in the field. They would search 578 "suspect sites" in Iraq for the chemical, biological and nuclear components that the Bush administration had cited time and again to justify the war. The Pentagon said the weapons hunters would have whatever they needed ? helicopters, Humvees in case weather grounded the choppers, and secure telecommunications.

But the "ground truth," as soldiers say, was this: chaos, disorganization, interagency feuds, disputes within and among various military units, and shortages of everything from gasoline to soap plagued the postwar search for evidence of Iraq's supposed unconventional weapons. . . .

Interviews with soldiers and government officials over three months with the Pentagon's 75th Exploitation Task Force, known as the XTF, identified a number of problems that might explain why the search has produced so little. The flaws are serious enough, according to some participants, that the searchers might indeed have overlooked weapons or their components ? if they were there to be found.

Some participants said the Bush administration used flawed intelligence to plan and conduct the search. They said planners had assumed that either chemical or biological weapons would be used against American forces in the field, proving their existence to the world. Or they assumed that if the armaments were not used, they would be easy to find.

Some said that promising sites were looted -- or cleared of evidence -- before Americans could search or secure them.

"Because we arrived at sites so late, so often," said Capt. J. Ryan Cutchin, the leader of the team known as MET Bravo, "we may never know what was there, and either walked or was taken away by looters and Baathist elements under the guise of looting." . . .

The intelligence on sites was often stunningly wrong, one senior officer agreed.

"The teams would be given a packet, with pictures and a tentative grid," he said. "They would be told: `Go to this place. You will find a McDonald's there. Look in the fridge. You will find French fries, cheeseburger and Cokes.' And they would go there, and not only was there no fridge and no McDonald's, there was never even a thought of ever putting a McDonald's there. Day after day it was like that."

Throughout their mission, MET units members expressed frustration that they were not permitted to discuss with Iraqi scientists and security officials either the amnesty for war crimes or the sizable monetary rewards that had been authorized to offer in exchange for cooperation, despite the Iraqis' obvious reluctance to participate as long as Mr. Hussein might be alive. Then the MET units were sent home two months before a normal rotation, though they had volunteered to stay.

Officials charged with cultivating Iraqis as sources remained unhappy with raids by Special Forces on their potential sources' homes in the dead of night. "Knocking down a scientist's door at 3 a.m., putting a bag over his head, and flex-cuffing his family while you search for hidden weapons or documents is hardly a way to induce his cooperation," one weapons expert said.

Now, with the failure so far to find prohibited weapons in Iraq, American intelligence officials and senior members of the administration have acknowledged that there was little new evidence flowing into American intelligence agencies in the five years since United Nations inspectors left Iraq, creating an intelligence vacuum.

"Once the inspectors were gone, it was like losing your G.P.S. guidance," added a Pentagon official, invoking as a metaphor the initials of the military's navigational satellites. "We were reduced to dead reckoning. We had to go back to our last fixed position, what we knew in '98, and plot a course from there. With dead reckoning, you're heading generally in the right direction, but you can swing way off to one side or the other." . . .

Richard Kerr, who headed a four-member team of retired C.I.A. officials that reviewed prewar intelligence about Iraq, said analysts at the C.I.A. and other agencies were forced to rely heavily on evidence that was five years old at least. . . .

Intelligence analysts drew heavily "on a base of hard evidence growing out of the lead-up to the first war, the first war itself and then the inspections process," Mr. Kerr said. "We had a rich base of information," he said, and, after the inspectors left, "we drew on that earlier base."

"There were pieces of new information, but not a lot of hard information, and so the products that dealt with W.M.D. were based heavily on analysis drawn out of that earlier period," Mr. Kerr said, using the shorthand for weapons of mass destruction.

Even so, just days before President Bush's State of the Union address in January, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, described the intelligence as not only convincing but up-to-date.

"It is a case grounded in current intelligence," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, "current intelligence that comes not only from sophisticated overhead satellites and our ability to intercept communications, but from brave people who told us the truth at the risk of their lives. We have that; it is very convincing." . . .

The arguments over evidence spilled into public view during the debate about whether the United Nations inspectors should be sent back to Iraq at all. Mr. Cheney had declared in August that returning them to Iraq would be dangerous, that it would create a false sense of security. When the inspectors returned in November, senior administration officials were dismissive of their abilities.

They insisted that American intelligence agencies had better information on Iraq's weapons programs than the United Nations, and would use that data to find Baghdad's weapons after Mr. Hussein's government was toppled. In hindsight, it is now clear just how dependent American intelligence agencies were on the United Nations weapons inspections process. . . .

Last fall, the administration repeatedly warned in public of the danger that an unprovoked Iraqi President Saddam Hussein might give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists.

"Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," President Bush said in Cincinnati on Oct. 7. "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released Friday by the White House show that at the time of the president's speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began circulating Oct. 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States.

"Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al Qaeda, . . . already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States, could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct," one key judgment of the estimate said.

It went on to say that Hussein might decide to take the "extreme step" of assisting al Qaeda in a terrorist attack against the United States if it "would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."

The declassified sections of the NIE were offered by the White House to rebut allegations that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The result, however, could be to raise more questions about whether the administration misrepresented the judgments of the intelligence services on another basis for going to war: the threat posed by Hussein as a source of weapons for terrorists.

The NIE's findings also raise concerns about the dangers posed by Hussein, who is believed to be in hiding, and the failure to find any of his alleged stocks of chemical and biological weapons. If such stocks exist, a hotly debated proposition, this is precisely the kind of dangerous situation the CIA and other intelligence services warned about last fall, administration officials said. A senior administration official said yesterday that the U.S. intelligence community does not know either "the extent to which Saddam Hussein has access or control" over the groups that are attacking U.S. forces, or the location of any possible hidden chemical or biological agents or weapons. Asked whether the former Iraqi leader would today use any chemical or biological weapons if he controlled them, the senior official said, "We would not put that past him to do whatever makes our lives miserable." . . .

Friday's declassified material from the NIE gave a much more complete picture of the intelligence in the form of all the key judgments of the intelligence community.

One of the judgments was that Hussein "appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or [chemical or biological weapons] against the United States fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger case for making war."

Another judgment was that Iraq would "probably" attempt a clandestine attack against the United States, as mentioned by Bush -- not on "any given day" as the president said Oct. 7, but only "if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable."

Today the situation is changed. Hussein is alive but in hiding, and his alleged stocks of chemical or biological weapons or agents have not been found. Meanwhile, the president and other leaders have yet to mention publicly the intelligence assessment that Hussein may be a potentially bigger threat now than before the United States attacked.

In fact, Bush, in his May 1 speech from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, appeared to take just the opposite position. "We have removed an ally of al Qaeda," Bush said. "No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime."

Are 16 words enough to cause a scandal? Depends on the words.

What if Bush had said the following 16 words in his State of the Union address: "The constitution is null and void. I'm now king. If anyone contests this, bring him on."

There were other misleading statements in that State of the Union address; we'll focus here only on the statement known to be based on a forgery.

CIA director George Tenet has been offered up as the fall guy. After the White House pinned the blame on him, he accepted responsibility for not vetting the false statement from the address. Although, God knows, he tried.

In secret testimony last week to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tenet made clear he had discouraged the use of the false statement, but that an official from the White House insisted it be included.

So who is that mystery White House official?

Tenet named the official, according to Senator Dick Durbin, who said confidentiality rules prevent him from revealing it. Fair enough.

But no rules prevent George Bush from revealing it. For that matter, isn't Bush hopping mad at this underling who played fast and loose with his presidential credibility -- unless, of course, the underling is that overling, Vice-President Dick Cheney. In which case Bush is probably too scared to raise the matter. (It's also possible that Bush knew about the forgery too.)

Cheney took an unusually keen interest in intelligence about Iraq, paying several visits to the CIA to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat Saddam posed, the London Guardian reported last week. When Cheney wasn't pressuring the CIA personally, his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was. The Guardian noted that the vice-president's hands-on involvement in intelligence was "unprecedented" in recent times.

Cheney also worked closely with a shadow intelligence unit, called the Office of Special Plans, which was set up by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and staffed mostly by right-wingers with no background in intelligence work.

The Guardian noted that, while the CIA's policy is to sort through raw intelligence data from agents and informants around the world and weed out anything unsubstantiated, the shadow intelligence unit was encouraged to hold onto everything, no matter how far-fetched. Intelligence on Iraq was of particular interest.

White House supporters are trying to suggest this is just a case of a minor error slipping through a big bureaucracy, that the administration is, at worst, guilty of sloppiness.

But there's nothing insignificant or haphazard about what happened. Somebody deliberately forged a document and, despite warnings from the head of the CIA, it ended up as a key piece of evidence supporting the president's case for war.

Who did the forgery? Was forgery part of the bag of tricks adopted by the ideologues in the shadow intelligence unit, in their zeal to deliver the more "forward-leaning" interpretation of Saddam's intentions that the vice-president so clearly wanted?

Let's not forget that this administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq, even after U.N. inspectors had scoured the country for months, unable to find evidence of a weapons program.

Brushing aside the inspectors, the United Nations and most of the world, the White House insisted the danger Saddam posed was so great that immediate action was required, and it launched a full military attack on what turned out to be an unarmed country. Thousands died; more are still dying over there.

What we've seen is a lie of staggering import. Or to put it another way: Sixteen little words, my eye.