New questions have been raised in Washington about the Bush administration's pre-war case for invading Iraq, following a White House decision to publish extracts from the classified document compiled by US intelligence agencies in October to provide the definitive assessment of Iraq's weapons programmes.
While the release of eight pages from the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was designed to show that the CIA and other intelligence agencies did advise the President that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction - none of which have yet been found - it also demonstrated that several statements made by leading officials had no intelligence backing.
For example, Vice-President Dick Cheney declared bluntly on television in the week before the war began in March that the administration believed Saddam Hussein had "reconstituted nuclear weapons". The NIE analysis flatly contradicts this. It said the agencies assessed "that Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any" The document goes on to say that the intelligence agencies believed that the Iraqi leader "remains intent on acquiring" nuclear weapons - but in a footnote in the document, the US State Department dissents even from this, saying there was a lack of "persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons programme".
In briefing reporters about the NIE assessment on Friday, a senior White House official also acknowledged that President Bush did not consult the CIA when he picked up and used the now-discredited British assertion that Iraq could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes.
Mr Bush repeated the claim on September 28th in his regular Saturday radio address to the nation and in a Rose Garden appearance after meeting members of Congress. Both times he attributed the charge to the British government.
The Washington Post yesterday called attention to a "global message" issued on September 26th and still on the White House website, in which the White House stated - without reference to Britain - that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given". The official explained that only staff in the White House typically saw the text of radio addresses.
The 45-minute claim is at the centre of the deepening crisis in the UK over pre-war claims that led to the apparent suicide on Friday of British weapons scientist Dr David Kelly.
Mr Bush also made claims in September that there "are al-Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq". This was not stated so directly by the the US intelligence agencies.
On Saturday, Democratic Senator Carl Levin said the issue was whether "administration officials made a conscious and very troubling decision to create a false impression about the gravity and imminence of the threat that Iraq posed to America".
The White House official also claimed that President Bush and National Security Adviser, Ms Condoleezza Rice, did not read all of the NIE document and missed the State Department footnote. The NIE report did conclude that Iraq was continuing, and in some areas expanding, chemical, biological and nuclear programmes and was likely to have a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade, according to the Washington Post.
"The President was comfortable at the time, based on the information that was provided in his speech" about using the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons, the White House official said. "The President of the United States is not a fact-checker."