This is what the New York Times says:
U.S. Report Raises Doubts About Iraq Weapons
By REUTERS
Filed at 3:25 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration pushed for war against Iraq last fall because of weapons of mass destruction despite a secret Pentagon report it did not have enough ``reliable information'' Iraq was amassing chemical weapons, a defense official said on Friday.
Hours after portions of the classified September 2002 report by the Defense Intelligence Agency leaked out on Friday, the head of the agency said information from the report was quoted out of context and his agency believed Iraq had a WMD program.
``The sentence that is being carried is a single sentence lifted out of a longer planning document,'' Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the DIA, told reporters after addressing a closed Senate Armed Services committee hearing on the issue.
Earlier, a U.S. defense official confirmed a sentence in the report that said the DIA did not have enough ``reliable information'' that Iraq had chemical weapons.
News of the report added to claims the White House and the Pentagon slanted intelligence on Baghdad's weapons program to justify the war. No such weapons have been found since Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was ousted in April.
``It (the report) talks about the fact that at the time in September 2002 we could not specifically pin down individual facilities operating as part of the weapons of mass destruction programs, specifically the chemical warfare portion,'' said Jacoby.
In no way, said Jacoby, was the document intended to suggest U.S. doubt that such a weapons program existed. ``DIA joined in the intelligence community assessment and that assessment assessed that they had a weapons of mass destruction program in place,'' said Jacoby.
``TRUST THE CLAIMS''
Republican Sen. John Warner urged Americans to trust the administration's claims. ``I make the appeal to the American people to continue to repose trust in this administration as we go forward (in the search).''
Reacting to the report, National Security Council spokesman Mike Anton said any charges the United States slanted intelligence were ``nonsense.''
``This report is consistent with the judgment of the intelligence community, with what the president was saying, with what the U.N. was saying, with what foreign governments believed and assessed about Iraq,'' said Anton.
Around the time of the DIA report, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went to Congress to press his case that Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons.
A small team of U.N. nuclear experts returned to Iraq on Friday but they said their role was to check on looting at a research facility that may have caused radioactive contamination and was not to look for any weapons.
Surprise at the lack of chemical weapons has even been expressed by the U.S. military. Last week, U.S. Marine Lt. Gen. James Conway said U.S. intelligence was ``simply wrong'' in leading the military to believe the invading troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons.
CIA Director George Tenet has defended his agency's intelligence on chemical and biological weapons, saying the ``integrity of our process was maintained throughout.''
On Friday, a leading national security historian, John Prados, concluded in a study that the CIA bowed to political pressure to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs ahead of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
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