The US: Vice-President Dick Cheney pressured CIA staff to produce reports that supported White House claims about banned Iraqi weapons, intelligence officials said yesterday.
Mr Cheney and his senior aide made "multiple" trips to the agency during the past year to question analysts studying Saddam Hussein's suspected chemical, biological and nuclear arms programme.
The visits "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here", one senior intelligence official told the Washington Post.
He said while trips to the CIA headquarters by a vice-president were not unprecedented, they were very unusual.
The claims follow news last week that the CIA has opened an investigation to determine if intelligence reports were manipulated to exaggerate the threat from Saddam's alleged illegal weapons and ties with al-Qaeda.
The Bush administration yesterday strongly denied pressuring intelligence agents to slant evidence to help justify attacking Iraq.
But some intelligence officials said the Deputy Defence Secretary, Mr Paul Wolfowitz, also encouraged them to write reports in a way that would help the Bush administration show that toppling Saddam was urgent.
Mr Wolfowitz, who with Mr Cheney was one of the chief architects of the war on Iraq, urged analysts to find evidence to suggest that Saddam was behind the September 11th attacks and the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.
"We got taskers to review the link between al-Qaeda and Iraq," said one former senior defence official. "There was a very aggressive search."
Meanwhile President Bush vowed to find the alleged weapons of mass destruction, as the US-led administration took steps to tighten its authority in Iraq.
"He's got a big country in which to hide them. Well, we'll look. We'll reveal the truth," Mr Bush said.
The President got a rousing reception from some 2,500 cheering US Air Force, Navy and Army troops in Qatar, on the last leg of a whirlwind tour of Europe and the Middle East.
The US-led administration in Iraq meanwhile was set to clamp down on incitement to violence against coalition troops or between ethnic and religious groups, a spokesman said.
The announcement came as a soldier was killed in the Iraqi hotspot town of Fallujah, a day after reinforcements were ordered to the area.
He was the 26th US soldier to be killed since President Bush announced the end of the war on May 1st.
But the failure to find even one scrap of evidence of Saddam's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq has provoked a raging debate in both the United States and Britain over whether the claims were hyped ahead of the war.
The chief UN arms inspector, Dr Hans Blix, said yesterday that, although Iraq had left unanswered many questions about its unconventional weapons, one should not assume such dangerous arms still existed.
Making his final report to the Security Council before retiring, Dr Blix said he had not found that Iraq had resumed its production of weapons of mass destruction, although this did not mean such programmes of rearmament did not exist. But he said it was "not justified to jump to the conclusion that something exists just because it is unaccounted for."