Failure to hunt Iraqi WMD to haunt Bush in polls

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a liberal-leaning US think tank, issued a report Thursday that compared public and declassified intelligence information with statements made by administration officials.

It concluded that the administration made the threat from Iraq sound more dire than the underlying information.

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"We have found and have gone to some length to define and lay out serious misrepresentation of the facts over and above what was in the intelligence findings," Jessica Mathews, president of the think tank and one of the authors, said.

In one example, she said UN weapons inspectors said the amount of biological growth medium that Iraq had could produce three times as much anthrax as it had declared if it used all that growth medium to produce anthrax.

President Bush in an Oct. 7, 2002, speech in Ohio, said: "The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for and is capable of killing millions."