"I believe we will find them," US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

"If you connected the dots about everything that we knew about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs going back to 1991 and going all the way up until March 2003, when we launched the attack against Iraq, you could come to only one conclusion," she told ABC's "This Week."

"And that was that this was an active program, that this was a dangerous program, this was a program that was being effectively concealed."

Secretary of State Colin Powell, meanwhile, stood by his February statement to the UN Security Council, in which he detailed US claims that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

"Not only have I been studying this for many, many years, but, as I prepared that statement, I worked very closely with the director of central intelligence, George Tenet," Powell told the "Fox News Sunday" program.

"That statement was vetted thoroughly by all of the analysts who are responsible for this account. We spent four days and nights out at the CIA, making sure that whatever I said was supported by our intelligence holdings.

"Because it wasn't the president's credibility and my credibility on the line," Powell said "it was the credibility of the United States of America," he said.

US President George W. Bush made Iraq's alleged possession of chemical and biological weapons central to his case for launching the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

But Washington has come under mounting criticism over the failure of US-led troops in Iraq to find the weapons, now US lawmakers have call for an investigation into whether the US administration distorted intelligence information in order to justify military action, which faced strong opposition from traditional allies like Germany and France.

Critics, including some columnists in prominent newspapers, have alleged that Bush and top aides like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld exaggerated Saddam's arsenal in order to convince the US public to support the war.

The New York Times wrote in an editorial Sunday that it was disturbed by what appeared to be an attempt by some Bush administration officials and members of congress to back away from the weapons of mass destruction allegation, emphasizing the viewpoint instead that it is simply a good outcome that Saddam Hussein has been forced from power.

"We are as pleased as anyone to see Saddam Hussein removed from power, but the United States cannot now simply erase from the record the Bush administration's dire warnings about the Iraqi weapons threat," the New York daily wrote.

"The urgent need to disarm Saddam Hussein was the primary reason invoked for going to war in March rather than waiting to see if weapons inspectors could bring Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs under control.

"If the intelligence is wrong, or the government distorts it, the United States will squander its credibility. Even worse, it will lose the ability to rally the world, and the American people, to the defense of the country when real threats materialize," the newspaper wrote.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday that Saddam Hussein had a network of small labs that conducted research on chemical and biological weapons, but did not actually possess any such weapons, quoting an interview with a high-ranking Iraqi general.

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