"There is no basis for that, none whatsoever," said William Luti, deputy undersecretary of defense for special plans and Near East and South Asian Affairs.

Faced with mounting questions over whether intelligence had been politicized to justify a war with Iraq, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith attacked the accuracy of press accounts on the role of a Pentagon analytical unit set up to review US intelligence on terrorism.

The mission of the team, which began with two people but grew to include about half a dozen, was to examine the existing intelligence for connections between terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and states that support terrorism, Feith said.

He said they "came up with some interesting observations about the linkages between Iraq and al- Qaeda," which they briefed to CIA director George Tenet last August, he said.

Feith said it was only an incidental finding of a broader look at whether international terrorist groups and state supporters of terrorism were cooperating across religious, philosophical and ideological lines.

The review was not narrowly focused on Iraq, nor did it deal with weapons of mass destruction, he said.

"This suggestion that we said to them this is what were looking at, go find it, is precisely the inaccuracy that we are here to rebut," he said.

At the time, Iraq's links to al-Qaeda was a central feature of the administration's argument for pre-emptive military action against Iraq. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld charged for the first time last August that senior al-Qaeda leaders were in Iraq.

The US intelligence community, however, was skeptical that an extreme Muslim fundamentalist group like al-Qaeda would work with a secular regime like Saddam Hussein's.

And the weight of the administration's rationale for invading Iraq later shifted to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as it argued its case at the United Nations.

Feith said there was no major change in the way the Bush administration viewed the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction from the way the Clinton administration saw it.

He said he turned to his own team to analyze the intelligence, rather than the Defense Intelligence Agency or the CIA, "not because we were dissatisfied with the intelligence or the intelligence analysis."

"It was because we needed people looking at that intelligence, good intelligence provided by the CIA and other agencies, from the point of view of what do we need to understand from this intelligence about these connections to allow us to develop a Defense Department strategy for the war on terrorism," he said.

Asked whether the team used reports from defectors brought out of Iraq by the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group with an interest in promoting the regime's overthrow, both Luti and Feith said no.

The Pentagon terrorism review team disbanded in August after its briefing to the CIA. Later, the same month Feith decided to set up an office of special plans under Luti to deal with issues related to Iraq, the officials said.

Luti said it rapidly expanded to meet those requirements.

"The special plans office was called special plans because at the time calling it the Iraq planning office might have undercut our diplomatic efforts with regard to Iraq and UN and elsewhere," Feith said.

"We set up an office to address the whole range of issues regarding the Iraq plans," he said.

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