Experts said the lack of deadly weapons found in Iraq so far also raised questions about how the White House used pre-war intelligence to support the US-led invasion of Iraq.

CIA head Tenet struck a delicate balance here Thursday, refusing to take the heat as scapegoat amid doubts over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq while also moving to try to protect President George W. Bush.

Tenet, who has led the Central Intelligence Agency for almost seven years, defended its record in a rare public address, saying the CIA had never said weapons of mass destruction in Iraq posed an "imminent threat."

Yet he did not go so far as to criticize the US-led war, as some opposition Democrats and others who opposed the conflict might have hoped.

Analysts "never said there was an imminent threat. Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policymakers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests," Tenet said in an address at Georgetown University.

"No one told us what to say or how to say it," he stressed.

Still, by saying there had never been any pressure to deliver an assessment of an imminent threat from Iraq, he appeared to suggest that authorities interpreted the intelligence they were given as just such a threat.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle said: "Director Tenet raised additional new doubts about the accuracy of statements made by senior Administration officials to convince Congress to authorize the war in Iraq.

"There is no more serious issue that any member (of Congress) will confront than the decision to place our troops in harm's way."

The Bush administration "presented an overall imminent threat," said researcher Marcus Corbin of the Center for Defense Information.

"The intelligence was skewed, no question," he said. "Whatever the intellignce, the administration pushed it much further.

"I think it's pretty lame to put the blame on foreign intelligence, Corbin added. "If we had to distribute the blame, it would probably be 90 percent administration and only 10 percent intelligence."

Corbin added that "if a government is not getting good intelligence, it usually means, to a certain extent, that it is not listening.

"If your consumers are pressing for particular answers, that message usually gets across one way or another."

Tenet acknowledged some intelligence gaps on Iraq in the run-up to the war, particularly involving "human assets" -- spies on the ground.

He also acknowledged that some intelligence found to have been false had not been discarded. And he acknowledged underestimating the Saddam Hussein regime's nuclear potential.

"He admitted to human deficiencies and that foreign intelligence reports found their way in (to) the national intelligence estimate of October of 2002, reports that were later proven to be a fabrication or discredited. Very preoccupying," remarked Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism operations chief.

But these problems do not seem to explain in and of themselves the gap between the Bush administration's portrayal of the situation just before the war, and the fact that weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq.

The administration's position has not been helped by new remarks by the former US weapons inspector, David Kay.

"To me, it's clear Iraq had no large stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons at the time of the war," Kay told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here Thursday.

In a report released last month, the Carnegie Endowment said the Bush administration had "systematically" misrepresented and exaggerated the threats presented by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Later on Friday the White House is due to name a special independent commission to probe the hiatus between pre-war US intelligence and the failure to find any WMD stockpiles.

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