WASHINGTON, Nov 14: A top White House aide has admitted that the US was “wrong” about presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but insisted that President George W. Bush neither manipulated intelligence nor misled the American people to justify the invasion of Baghdad.

“Turns out we were wrong,” said Stephen J. Hadley, Mr Bush’s National Security Advisor. “But I think the point that needs to be emphasized ... allegations now that the president somehow manipulated intelligence, somehow misled the American people, are flat wrong,” Mr Hadley said at a television talk show.

Appearing on CNN’s “Late Edition,” Mr Hadley said the White House is “supporting” the study, adding: “I think that what you’re going to find is that the statements by the administration had backing at the time from accepted intelligence sources.”

He said that when administration statements turned out to be wrong, that was “because the underlying intelligence was not true, but that’s not the same as manipulating intelligence, and that is not misleading the American people.”

But Democrats remained unimpressed. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean rejected what Mr Hadley had to say stressing, “The truth is, the president misled America when he sent us to war”. Mr Dean went one step ahead and said that the Bush administration had a “fundamental problem” in telling the truth.

John McCain, a senior Republican senator and presidential hopeful for 2008, however, argued that while the Democrats had the right to criticize the Iraq war it was disingenuous to say that the president lied about the intelligence in order to make the case for going to war. Every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russians, the French... all reached the same conclusions,” the senator said.

The failed intelligence on Iraq is leading to new questions about how accurate Washington’s assertions could be about North Korea and especially Iran.

Meanwhile, the Republican chairman of the Senate select committee on intelligence said on Sunday that one lesson of the faulty pre-war intelligence on Iraq was that senators would take a hard look at intelligence before voting to go to war.

“I think a lot of us would really stop and think a moment before we would ever vote for war or to go and take military action,” Sen Pat Roberts said on “Fox News Sunday.”