The Bush administration has hit back at accusations by leaders of the House of Representatives' intelligence committee that the United States went to war in Iraq on the basis of outdated and vague intelligence.
Senior US officials said that premise would have assumed a dramatic change in behaviour by Saddam Hussein - the elimination of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction since the departure of United Nations inspectors in 1998.
"I just don't think that was plausible," national security adviser Ms Condoleezza Rice said on Fox News last night.
She said: "There was enrichment of the intelligence from 1998 over the period leading up to the war. Nothing pointed to a reversal of Saddam Hussein's very active efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. . . . It was very clear that this had continued and that it was a gathering danger."
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US officials made the case that war was necessary to remove the Iraqi president because of Iraq's stockpiles of illegal arms, including chemical weapons capable of use against approaching American soldiers.
But leaders of the House intelligence panel said in a letter last week to CIA Director Mr George Tenet that those claims resulted largely from fragmentary and circumstantial evidence filled with uncertainties.
The Washington Postreported yesterday on the letter from Reps Mr Porter Goss and Ms Jane Harman, the Republican chairman and ranking Democrat on the committee.
The letter reportedly cited "significant deficiencies" in the intelligence agencies' ability to collect fresh intelligence on Iraq after UN weapons inspectors left in 1998. Instead, the letter said, the agencies relied on "past assessments" and "some new `piecemeal' intelligence" that went largely unchallenged.
Six months after the war began, and three months after the administration sent a CIA team led by former United Nations chief inspector Mr David Kay to search, neither US troops nor Mr Kay's inspectors have reported finding weapons of mass destruction.