WASHINGTON, 23 June 2003 — A Democratic presidential hopeful yesterday accused President George W. Bush of misleading the country about Iraq’s possession of unconventional weapons.

“We were misled. The question is, did the president do that on purpose or was he misled by his own intelligence people ... Or did he in fact know what the truth was and tell us something different,” former Vermont Governor Howard Dean told NBC’s “Meet the Press” program.

“We essentially went to war ... based on facts that turned out not to be accurate. I think that’s pretty serious, and I think the American people are entitled to know why that was,” he said.

“This president told us that we were going into Iraq because they might have atomic weapons and that turned out not to be so,” he said.

“The secretary of defense told us that he knew where there were weapons of mass destruction around Tikrit and around Baghdad. We’ve been in control of Iraq for 50 days and we haven’t been able to find any such thing.”

The Washington Post said yesterday, citing intelligence and congressional sources that Bush brushed aside important caveats in intelligence reports linking Iraq to the Al-Qaeda network.

Bush appeared before the US public in a nationally broadcast address in October, declaring that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States, in part because of ties he asserted Baghdad maintained with Al-Qaeda.

But sources with access to classified materials told The Post that “a still-classified national intelligence report circulating within the Bush administration at the time ...portrayed a far less clear picture about the link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda than the one presented by the president.”

The classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, which represented the consensus of the US intelligence agencies, contained cautionary language and warnings about the reliability of information from Iraqi defectors and Al-Qaeda captives.

“There has always been an internal argument within the intelligence community about the connections between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. The NIE had alternative views,” one senior intelligence official told the paper.

The Post also raised doubts about Bush’s assertion in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa to relaunch a nuclear weapons program. Ten months earlier, the Central Intelligence Agency sent a former diplomat to Niger to investigate the claim, the paper said. That country’s officials said documents alleging the sale were forged, it added.

Details of the probe were not shared with the White House, the paper said.

Meanwhile, some US experts believe that two Iraqi tractor-trailers that the Bush administration said were mobile biological weapons laboratories were in fact designed for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons, The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday. The newspaper said that although some US officials have described this theory as far-fetched, the US Army has its own fleet of vehicles designed for precisely the same purpose. They are Humvees with a large container and refrigerator-sized generator where a gun or troop transport shell should be, the report said.

In a report released last month, the CIA said the two trailers discovered in northern Iraq in April and May were some of the mobile biological weapons laboratories mentioned by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in his speech before the UN Security Council in February.

But some analysts involved in the examination of the vehicles reject that conclusion, pointing out that thorough inspections have failed to find any traces of anthrax, smallpox, tularemia or any other known pathogens inside the trucks, according to The Times. One intelligence official in Iraq said he was convinced that the seized trailers were indeed designed to produce hydrogen gas to fill weather balloons that were routinely used by Iraqi field artillery batteries, the paper said.

Bush has faced mounting criticism over the intelligence information he used to justify the war in Iraq. Two congressional committees have launched closed-door hearings into whether Bush hyped intelligence regarding Iraq’s alleged nuclear and biological weapons program, which could prove damaging to Republicans in the 2004 election campaign.

But a senior senator said yesterday Congress’s review of US pre-war intelligence on Iraq may take “months.” Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and their staff members are pouring over “thousands and thousands of pages” of classified documents delivered to the panel by the CIA, said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the committee.

The task of reviewing the contents of those files will occupy the committee “for the next, I would assume, couple of months,” said Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia. The committee’s chairman, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, said the senators face the daunting task of reviewing “voluminous material from the ceiling to the floor.”