Time and Newsweek said the administration's tendency to read what it wanted to hear in the reports may be why little evidence has surfaced of Baghdad's nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs.

Central Intelligence Agency officials told Time they would soon present evidence Iraq was developing such weapons, but it appeared searchers were running out of leads.

"We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad," Lieutenant General James Conway, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, said last week. "But they're simply not there."

The case against Iraq was based largely on assumptions rather than hard evidence, Newsweek reported, citing unnamed administration and intelligence officials.

The newsweekly said Secretary of State Colin Powell suspected officials had "cherry-picked" information that supported the administration's point of view for his February 5 presentation to the United Nations.

The Pentagon also tended to choose the most dire explanation for intelligence where the meaning was not clear, Time said.

"There was a predisposition in this sdministration to assume the worst about Saddam," a senior military officer told the newsweekly. "They were inclined to see and interpret evidence a particular way to support a very deeply held conviction."

An unnamed Army intelligence officer blamed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the tendency.

"Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically, distorting the intelligence," the officer told Time.

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