UNITED NATIONS - Time has shown that the United Nations did a good job disarming Iraq while US President George W. Bush went to war based on "a lie," former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter said.

　　"The inspectors went in, got good co-operation, got immediate access to the sites they needed to get to, and they found nothing - nothing related to weapons of mass destruction programmes," said Ritter, a former US Marine and senior weapons inspector turned anti-war activist.

　　"And yet, we heard over and over again that 'The president knows that these weapons exist, the president knows that this is a threat that can only be responded to by the United States acting unilaterally,' because the United Nations was unable or unwilling to complete the (disarmament) task mandated by the Security Council," he told reporters at UN headquarters.

　　"The entire case the Bush administration made against Iraq is a lie," he said.

　　Ritter leveled his latest blast at the US administration as Bush fended off critics' charges that he misled the American people by relying on faulty intelligence to justify the war.

　　A top inspector in Iraq for nearly seven years before resigning in 1998, Ritter was a vocal critic both before and after the war of US claims that Iraq possessed illicit weapons of mass destruction. His latest book, "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America," was just published.

　　Ritter said Washington had never meant to let UN inspectors finish the task of disarming Iraq, as assigned to them by the 15-nation Security Council.

　　"The policy of the United States towards Iraq was not disarmament. It has always been regime removal - eliminating Saddam Hussein from power. It's been the stated policy of the United States since 1991," he said.

　　Bush defence

　　Bush has come under fire for citing an allegation in his State of the Union speech in January that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa to make nuclear weapons. Administration officials now say they have doubts about the evidence the statement was true.

　　Bush told reporters on Monday his administration believed the claim was true at the time and only afterward learned there were doubts about it.

　　Meanwhile, US President George W. Bush on Monday defended the quality of CIA intelligence as "darn good" as he tried to put out a firestorm over his disputed allegation that Iraq sought uranium from Africa for nuclear weapons.

　　Having just returned from Africa, Bush and his White House team found themselves facing tough questions about whether he misled the country to justify the Iraq war, as US troops there die on average of one a day under attack by Saddam Hussein loyalists.

　　"I think the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence. And the speeches I have given were backed by good intelligence," Bush said.

　　Bush said the administration believed the claim was true when he made it and only afterward learned there were doubts about it. "When I gave the speech, the line (about African uranium) was relevant ... Subsequent to the speech, the CIA had some doubts," he said.

　　Blair blasted

　　As Bush again blamed the CIA for giving him the information, Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter suggested Bush bears ultimate responsibility.

　　At the same time, the UN nuclear watchdog believes Britain's evidence on Iraq trying to import uranium from Africa is all based on forged documents, a diplomat close to the agency said on Monday.

　　A Western diplomat close the Vienna-based UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the IAEA had the impression the so-called genuine evidence was ultimately referring to the same alleged transaction described in a series of fake documents.

　　"I understand that it concerned the same group of documents and the same transaction," the diplomat said on condition on anonymity. Another diplomat said he thought Britain's other evidence came from French intelligence services.

　　Blair, who meets Bush in Washington on July 17, is also facing mounting accusations that he overplayed the intelligence findings, knowingly or unknowingly, to justify going to war with Iraq. Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, who once headed the IAEA, delivered a fresh blow on Sunday when he said Britain committed a "fundamental mistake" when it said Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction at 45-minutes notice.

　　The IAEA's impression arose from briefings on intelligence about Iraq gathered by national intelligence agencies.

　　Most of these briefings took place between November and March while the IAEA was hunting for signs Baghdad had secretly renewed its nuclear weapons programme.

　　While IAEA officials did not actually see Britain's so-called genuine evidence, the diplomat said the IAEA had been briefed about it and concluded it referred to the same transaction which the agency now believes was never attempted.

　　In a July 1 letter to US Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, the IAEA's director of external relations wrote that it was clear that Iraq would never have been able to buy uranium from Niger.

　　"The alleged contract could not have been honoured, as the export of uranium from Niger is fully controlled by international companies," IAEA's Piet de Klerk wrote.

　　After determining it would have been impossible for Iraq to import uranium from the world's number-three uranium producer, the IAEA looked more closely at the six letters submitted as evidence that Iraq tried to buy two 500-ton shipments of uranium and concluded that all were fakes.