Larry DiRita, the Pentagon's acting spokesman, insisted, however, that the top priority of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group will remain to hunt for the weapons of mass destruction that Baghdad was believed have before the war.

"What people wonder is ... while they are doing that are there any synergies that can help the counter-terrorism problem," he told reporters.

"What dynamic relationship could be established between those two problems in a way that does not detract from the original mission, or the principle mission (of the ISG)," he said.

DiRita spoke in response to a New York Times story that said the Bush administration was weighing whether to shift intelligence resources from the hunt for weapons of mass destruction to bolster counter-insurgengcy efforts.

A coordinated wave of suicide bombings in Baghdad this week and a rocket attack on a hotel where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying were powerful signals that opposition to the US-led occupation has taken a deadly new turn.

Senior military leaders have appeared divided over whether the latest attacks are an extension of attacks by Iraqi loyalists of the former regime or whether foreign fighters are now flexing their muscles with suicide tactics more familiar from conflicts in Israel and Lebanon.

General John Abizaid, the commander of US forces in Iraq, has expressed his desire over the past several weeks for more counter-terrorism and intelligence assets go after the terrorist threat, DiRita said, citing as examples a need for more translators and interrogators.

He said Abizaid has moved people within the theater of operations to beef up counter-terrorism in Iraq, but he was looking for other ways of beefing up those forces.

"Abizaid feels very strongly he needs more counter-terrorism resources and he's going to get it," DiRita said.

Abizaid and Paul Bremer, the civilian head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, have been in Washington for two days of high level meetings at the Pentagon to review the situation in Iraq.

While the question of how the ISG might be used was not a topic of discussion, DiRita said, the counter-terrorism issue has been under discussion for several weeks.

He said he did not know whether the discussions so far involved detailing personnel from the ISG to counter-terrorism mission, or reducing the size of the ISG to fee up people with the required expertise.

"What I know is what I've told you," he said. "We've got one unit out there that has been assigned a particular priority. That priority won't change.

"And now you have the commanders all talking to each other, always talking about what resources they have and could be made available to other comanders. General Dayton is one of the commanders out there," he said.

While Major General Keith Dayton, operations director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, is the group's military commander, the ISG is headed by David Kay, who works for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The hunt has failed so far to turn up any banned weapons, and officials have said it will take months to piece together what happened to the weapons and programs that served as the prime US rationale for the war.

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