Government sources said CIA analysts were not the only ones who felt pressure from their superiors to support public statements by Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others about the threat posed by Hussein.

Former and current intelligence officials said they felt a continual drumbeat, not only from Cheney and Libby, but also from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Feith, and less so from CIA Director George J. Tenet, to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that going into Iraq was urgent.

"They were the browbeaters," said a former defense intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the assessments they were receiving. "In interagency meetings," he said, "Wolfowitz treated the analysts' work with contempt."

The same magazine also reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) formally concluded that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons" in September 2002, just as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld was telling Congress that the Baghdad "regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas".

The accounts of Newsweek and Time were similarly damning. One "informed military source" told Newsweek that when the US Central Command (CENTCOM) asked the CIA for specific WMD targets that should be destroyed in the first stages of the invasion, the agency only complied reluctantly. But what it provided "was crap", a CENTCOM planner told the magazine, consisting mainly of buildings that were bombed in the first Gulf War in 1991.

If true, that contradicts a series of bald assertions by administration officials and their supporters over the last nine months. "Simply stated," Vice President Dick Cheney declared in the first call to arms last August, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction".