"We discovered weapons manufacturing facilities that were condemned by the United Nations," Bush told reporters in a special interview prior to leaving Friday on a tour of Europe and the Middle East.

"Biological laboratories described by our secetary of state to the whole world that were not supposed to be there, that are a direct violation of the UN resolutions, have been discovered."

The US administration used the threat of Iraq's weapons programmes to justify the invasion of Iraq on March 20.

But the United States has yet to show firm proof of banned chemical or biological weapons since the downfall of Saddam Hussein on April 9.

The administration has, however, cited two specially equipped tractor-trailer rigs seized in Iraq as evidence that the Saddam regime had been making the banned weapons.

"The president is indeed satisfied with the intelligence that he received," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters, citing the discovery of the two mobile laboratories that could potentially be used to produce chemical or biological weapons.

"On the rest of all the intelligence, of course the president continues to be satisfied with it. He thinks it's borne out," said the spokesman.

A Central Intelligence Agency report said the trailers, and a mobile laboratory truck seized in late April near Baghdad, are "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program."

But intelligence analysts have acknowledged they had no concrete evidence the trailers were used to make biological agents or what kind of agents they were designed to make.

Their main reason for concluding the biological warfare role was the striking similarity to trailers described before the war by an Iraqi chemical engineer who managed one of the BW plants, they said.

After the war started, the US rationale for the invasion shifted to liberating the Iraqi people and dismantling not weapons but weapons programs, while raising questions as to whether Saddam destroyed his alleged arsenal or hid it abroad.

But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted Thursday that the United States still believes that the Saddam regime had chemical and biological weapons.

"People are saying why haven't we found anything, and I would respond by saying, A, it's going to take some time, and, B, we have found things," he said in a radio interview.

"I can assure you that this war was not waged under any false pretext," Rumsfeld added.

"We believed then and we believe now that the Iraqis have, had chemical weapons, biological weapons and that they had a program to develop nuclear weapons but did not have nuclear weapons," he said.

"That is what the United Kingdom's intelligence suggested as well."

Rumsfeld said the reason no weapons have been found "is not because they are not there -- we believe they are there."

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