CIA chief defends Bush over Iraq

By Nick Childs
BBC Pentagon correspondent

Tenet: Called for patience as hunt for Iraqi WMD continues

CIA chief George Tenet has said he does not think the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence on Iraq before the war.

He called for continued patience in the hunt for alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

At the same time, he said that it is important for the intelligence community to find out whether it was right or wrong.

Mr Tenet was speaking at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

He faced some tough questions on the issue of pre-war Iraqi intelligence.

'Warmongering'?

In a tense exchange, Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy at one point described the Bush administration's rhetoric as warmongering.

But when he asked the CIA director if he believed the administration had misrepresented the facts to justify the war, Mr Tenet said he did not.

He suggested there were occasions when intelligence may have been misconstrued, as he put it, and insisted he did say so behind the scenes within the administration.

But Mr Tenet said the intelligence community believed, before the war, that the former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, was continuing to deceive and build weapons programmes that might threaten US interests.

As for the issue of the quality of the intelligence itself another senior Democrat, Carl Levin, described it as a fiasco.

But Mr Tenet called for continued patience as the hunt for weapons goes on.