The US today countered media reports claiming they had exaggerated the Iraqi weapons threat in the countdown to their recent attack on the Gulf state and announced plans to boost the number of arms inspectors.
The controversy surfaced as the administration of President George W Bush accused Iran of sending radicals to Iraq to foment disorder.
As the US-led forces have so far come up empty-handed in their hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, reports have emerged that top US and British officials harboured serious doubts about the intelligence they were being asked to present to the world as cold fact.
British newspaper, The Guardian, said today that British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and US Secretary of State Colin Powell discussed concerns in a private meeting in New York before Mr Powell delivered a UN Security Council briefing claiming Iraq was concealing banned weapons.
The newspaper's story was based on information from an unnamed diplomatic source, who reportedly read a transcript of the conversation.
The British Foreign Office dismissed the report as "simply untrue" and insisted that "no such meeting took place" between Mr Powell and Mr Straw.
But The Guardianreported that Mr Powell told Mr Straw he had left intelligence meetings "apprehensive" about the information he viewed as "at best, circumstantial evidence".
US News and World Reportmade similar claims yesterday, saying Mr Powell was under persistent pressure from the Pentagon and White House to include questionable intelligence in his report on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
The magazine also said the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had issued a classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons program last September, arguing that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons".
But The Guardianclaimed that US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Mr Paul Wolfowitz, chose to bypass the traditional sources for intelligence, the CIA and DIA. Instead, it said, they created a new department to vet tips on Iraq's weapons threat.Fueling the controversy, Mr Wolfowitz admitted in an article in Vanity Fairmagazine that the adminstration had cited weapons of mass destruction as the cause for war "because it was the one ... everyone could agree on".
The US House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence has demanded explanations from CIA Director Mr George Tenet to determine whether there was any political manipulation of the facts.
"This could conceivably be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time," Ms Jane Harman, senior Democrat on the committee told The New York Times.
"I doubt it, but we have to ask. It was the moral justification for the war. I think the world is owed an accounting."
Mr Bush's staunchest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said he had "no doubt at all" that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
As the controversy flared, the US military announced that a 1,300 member team will shift the search for weapons from suspect sites compiled before the war to a more comprehensive intelligence gathering effort on Saddam's ousted regime.
Maj Gen Keith Dayton, who is leading the group, sounded less than certain about the results.
In Iraq, US Central Command said a senior Baath official was captured and questioned in connection with recent attacks on US troops.
Six US soldiers have been killed in the past week as local frustration at the slow pace of US reconstruction efforts intnsify.
The commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, Lieutenant General James Conway, said the more than 140,000 US troops in Iraq and Kuwait could remain indefinitely.
Yesterday, US-led forces claimed that Islamic hardliners intent on destabilising Iraq were streaming into the country from neighbouring Iran.
The announcement came the day after Mr Rumsfeld said Tehran was shipping elite troops across the border into Iraq.
An item on coalition radio in Baghdad did not mention Iran by name but appealed to local Iraqis to inform the coalition of the identities and whereabouts of "infiltrators" it said were being controlled from abroad.
Iran's Foreign Minister Ms Kamal Kharazi scorned the US allegations and accused Washington of seeking to strip Iraqis of their rights and impose a puppet government.
"These accusations make us laugh," he said Friday. "These countries have occupied Iraq and then they accuse us of interfering. These accusations are totally false".
AFP