WASHINGTON: The vigorous defence of the CIA by its director, George Tenet, showed he will not stand by and allow critics to use the embattled agency as a scapegoat for President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

Central Intelligence Agency analysts never told the White House that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programmes posed an "imminent threat" to the United States, Tenet said on Thursday.

"Rather," he said, "they painted an objective assessment for our policymakers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programmes that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests."

Tenet's comments will likely shift the focus back to allegations - mostly from Bush's Democratic opponents - that the White House overstated the threat to bolster public support for a war.

While Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney avoided directly saying Iraq was an imminent threat in the months leading up to the war, they described it as a gathering danger to the United States that required immediate action. But on at least two occasions, aides answered in the affirmative when asked if Iraq posed an "imminent threat".

Tenet also honed in on allegations that the CIA had coloured its findings under pressure from the White House to draw conclusions that would support Bush's political position.

"No one told us what to say or how to say it," he said. The speech before students at Georgetown University was the first time Tenet publicly addressed the intelligence maelstrom swirling since the former US weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, dropped his bombshell last week.

Kay told Congress that after his team searched for months, he believed there were no large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq. Kay faulted the US intelligence community for getting it "almost all wrong".

Kay's revelations brought to a head months of debate as to whether the US justification for invading Iraq was valid, and prompted Bush to announce he would appoint a commission to investigate US intelligence gathering prior to the war.

They also prompted Secretary of State Colin Powell to indicate he may have had doubts about the invasion had US intelligence concluded there were no stockpiles prior to the war. He told the Washington Post the discovery had changed the "political calculus" as to whether Saddam was a real and present danger.

Tenet's speech at Georgetown University did not shed any new light on whether weapons are still in Iraq or will be found, but he rebuffed claims by Kay that the search was almost over.

He confronted issues about the accuracy of the CIA's work, and conceded the agency's conclusions about Iraq may not pan out to be entirely true because intelligence gathering is an imperfect process. -DPA