President George W. Bush, in building his case against Iraq in a speech last October, gave a harder version of its alleged links with al Qaeda than US intelligence did, the Washington Postreports.
A still-classified intelligence report, which had been reviewed by administration officials at the time of Mr Bush's speech, included cautionary language about the possible links and warnings about the reliability of some evidence, the Postreported on Sunday.
The report, known as the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, represented the consensus of the US intelligence community, according to intelligence analysts and congressional sources who read the report, the Postsaid.
"There has always been an internal argument within the intelligence community about the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda," said a senior intelligence official interviewed by the newspaper.
In his October 7th speech in Cincinnati, Mr Bush said Iraq posed an immediate threat to the United States, partly because of the ties he said it had to al Qaeda, blamed for the September 11th, 2001 attacks.
He cited high-level contacts that "go back a decade" and said "we've learned" that Iraq trained al Qaeda members "in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," the Postreported.
The newspaper quoted its sources as saying that although the president offered essentially circumstantial evidence, his remarks included none of the caveats about the reliability of this information that were in the national intelligence document.
As the months go by without chemical or biological weapons being found in Iraq, the Bush administration is facing increasing questioning over whether it exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam.
Last week Mr Bush dismissed his critics as "historical revisionists."
In his weekly radio address yesterday, he said one of the reasons weapons of mass destruction had not been found was that arms sites had been looted in the final days of Saddam's rule.
"The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed," Mr Bush said.