Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said her committee's inquiry into intelligence on Iraq will look into President Bush's claim in his State of the Union speech that Iraq sought uranium from Africa -- a statement apparently based on a series of documents now known to be forgeries.

"The speech should not have cited British information about which the US intelligence community had expressed serious doubts," Harman, newly returned from a trip to Iraq, said in a statement. "I appreciate that the administration and (Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet) have acknowledged that it was a mistake to have included this information in the president's speech, but big questions remain about who forged the documents and the paper trail that followed."

Separately, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., sent a 12-page letter to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss on Tuesday that spelled out his questions about prewar Iraqi intelligence and called for immediate, open hearings into the documents purporting to be from Niger.

"It is now abundantly clear that something fundamentally wrong has occurred," Waxman wrote. "The issues about the Niger hoax ... should not be allowed to fester."

Republican leaders sought to knock the criticisms aside. Goss, R-Fla., refused to be drawn into the controversy over how the Niger uranium allegation found its way into Bush's address, and said he remains confident in Tenet as CIA director.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, also defended Tenet, and dismissed the controversy as an "incredibly overblown" result of Democratic presidential hopefuls vying for support in advance of their primaries.

DeLay said that Bush "didn't lie. He didn't mislead anybody. His statement was accurate." The majority leader also responded forcefully to a question of whether Tenet should depart the government. "Absolutely not," he said.

The Bush administration has acknowledged its error in using the Niger allegations in Bush's speech, despite serious doubts expressed by the intelligence community.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., appearing on NBC's "Today" show Tuesday, said "there is a broader issue, and that is the failed policy toward Iraq." Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, accused Bush of deception.

"He deceived the American people by allowing into a State of the Union speech -- at a critical point when he was making the case for war with Iraq -- a statement that he either knew was wrong or should have known was wrong."

Another Democratic presidential hopeful, Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, joined two former intelligence officials to blast Bush administration use of intelligence.

Andrew Wilkie, a senior analyst from Australia's Office of National Assessments, said the war on Iraq was sold using inaccurate information.

"In that time, I saw not a single piece of critical hard intelligence to substantiate the claim of any cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida," said Wilkie, who resigned before the war to Australian government support for the war.

Wilkie was joined by Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst who retired in 1990 and now heads a group of retired intelligence officers critical of the Bush administration's handling of prewar intelligence.

Overseas, Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into reports that Italian intelligence agencies gave those documents to US and British intelligence, the foreign minister in Rome said Tuesday.

Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Tuesday that Italy "never, never gave documentation relative to this issue to other nations' intelligence services."

(China Daily July 16, 2003)